


At the Gates of Valhalla

by paperstorm, TrishArgh



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2019, Embedded Images, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Memory Loss, Minor Violence, POV Alternating, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Steve Rogers, Recovery, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-04-06 17:08:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19066960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrishArgh/pseuds/TrishArgh
Summary: The man has eyes the color of the sky. Hands that are bloodied from battle but might be gentle if they touched him. A voice that drags the ghosts of memories through the soldier’s fractured mind, and he can’t die. The soldier was sent to kill him. Ordered it, assigned it. And he didn’t, so he can’t go back. Not without completing a mission. Not again. He needs to run, to hide. To find some secret corner of the world where they’ll never find him.If the man drowns, it will all be for nothing. The man has to live. Even if the soldier might be taken back and put permanently into the ice for disobeying.//On the banks of the Potomac River, Steve wakes up to watch the Winter Soldier's back as he walks away. He can't let him go. Hydra might find him, and if they don't, SHIELD will, and Steve doesn't trust them either. Not when Bucky is buried in there somewhere. They have to run.





	1. Run

**Author's Note:**

> Created for the Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2019. 
> 
> The author fell in love with the art the second she saw it, and was so thrilled to work (again!) with such a lovely artist. Trish, the piece you created is stunning and soft and warm and it inspired so many lovely details in the story that I never would have thought of on my own. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to [Ignisentis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ignisentis/pseuds/Ignisentis) for her beta work, for fantastic suggestions and for catching a few plot-holes.
> 
> The artist was so thrilled when she saw who picked her art :D Andie, I adore your writing and I was so lucky to work with you again. You brought my piece to life and so much more. I love this fic and i hope everyone else enjoys it just as much <3
> 
> Thank you for checking out our work and we hope you enjoy!  
> xx Andie and Trish

 

The man doesn’t move. Water drips from his skin, slow rivulets of it sliding down over pale cheeks. His face is going blue, worsening by the second. With no oxygen intake, he’ll be dead in minutes. The soldier hesitates. The man can’t die. He doesn’t know why he knows that. The chaos of tears in the fabric of reality are still fresh and gaping and excruciating in his head. There are voices yelling. Things that resemble memories clawing at each other underneath his skull. But this man isn’t allowed to die. The soldier has to stop it from happening.  
   
His head aches. His teeth grind. Waiting, maybe for the mouthguard. He knows he’s ruined everything. Failed in his mission. Left wreckage behind him. Corrective action will be unrelenting.  
   
The man has eyes the color of the sky. Hands that are bloodied from battle but might be gentle if they touched him. A voice that drags the ghosts of memories through the soldier’s fractured mind, and he can’t die. The soldier was sent to kill him. Ordered it, assigned it. And he didn’t, so he can’t go back. Not without completing a mission. Not again. He needs to run, to hide. To find some secret corner of the world where they’ll never find him.  
   
If the man drowns, it will all be for nothing. The man has to live. Even if the soldier might be taken back and put permanently into the ice for disobeying.  
   
Then the man coughs. Splutters, expelling water from his lungs. Gasping harshly for air to replace it with. The soldier watches, sharp-eyed, as the broad chest rises and falls. Alright. He’ll live, now. Good. The first mission the soldier has ever assigned himself, and he finished it. That’s something.  
   
He turns to go. Where, he’ll figure out on the way. He just can’t be here. The man with the yellow hair and the blue eyes will have a team, a unit with guns and bombs and facilities where they’ll lock the soldier up if they capture him. Escape at all costs. Never leave a trail behind. He knows that rule. Had that lesson carved into his skin so it would stick.  
   
“Wait.”  
   
His shoulders stiffen. Plates in his metal hand whir as it clenches in reaction. He doesn’t stop walking. Water squishes in his boots.  
   
“Wait!”  
   
The second time, he does stop. He doesn’t mean to. Obedience is his natural state, but only to some. It shouldn’t be, to this man. This man, this  _stranger_ , shouldn’t be able to command the soldier to do anything.  
   
“Bucky, wait, don’t go, we can figure this out.”  
   
Begging. Pleading, pathetic, the soldier knows that tone. Others begged, when knives or whips or chemicals were brought to their skin. He never does.  
   
He turns his head. The man is leaning slightly to one side, holding his ribcage in his hand. There’s a bullet in his flesh. Burrowing through veins. Oozing blood down over his dirty fingers. It mixes with the water soaked through his uniform and trails down over his hip. He might die, soon, if he doesn’t get medical attention. His face is swollen, red where the soldier had made contact with his fists, aiming to kill. Before he’d stopped. Before the man had spoken, said words from a million years ago that the soldier recognized, and made him stop.  
   
Even still, the familiar tone is infuriating. “Don’t call me that,” he says.  
   
“Okay.” The man holds up his free hand, surrendering. His eyebrows are raised. He looks nervous. “Okay, what’s your name?”  
   
The soldier narrows his eyes. He doesn’t understand the question.  
   
“Bu – uh, listen, we have to get outta here, okay?”  
   
“Where?” he asks.  
   
“I …” the man shakes his head, lips parted stupidly. He looks around them, nearing frantic. “I don’t know, we can figure that out, we just can’t stay here.”  
   
“I’m not staying here,” the soldier answers shortly. He turns back, steps lumbering as he moves toward the trees. He’s wounded, as well. There could be cracks in his ribs from where the beam fell on him, before the man lifted it. He needs sustenance, and maintenance. It’s been too long. Maybe he will go back. They’ll beat him within an inch of his life for disobeying, but they have before, and he’s survived. He could again.  
   
“Bucky!” the man calls.  
   
“Don’t!” he yells back, not stopping.  
   
“You can’t go back to them!”  
   
It makes him stop again. The man shouldn’t know that.  
   
“Not without killing me. Am I right?”  
   
The soldier glares over his shoulder. The man is walking closer again. Slow, one hand still out in front, like he’s worried the soldier fears him. He’s wrong. The man lived because the soldier chose to let him live. He could still change his mind.  
   
“You know who I am,” the man says.  
   
“No, I don’t.”  
   
“You do,” he argues, getting ever closer. “You wouldn’t have saved me if you didn’t.”  
   
“I know you. I don’t know  _who_ you are,” the soldier corrects. The difference matters. “They wouldn’t tell me.”  
   
The man blinks twice. “They knew?”  
   
That doesn’t make sense, so he ignores it. “What do you want?”  
   
“Come with me.”  
   
“Why?”  
   
“They lied to you.” He’s much closer, now, and the soldier does know him. “Right? You asked them who I was, didn’t you? And they told you that you didn’t know me, that you were imagining it?”  
   
His mind screams. He knows those blue eyes and that low voice and those delicate fingers. Long eyelashes, with river water dripping from them. A nose with a slight bump in it. The soldier remembers that nose being broken, and not healing quite as straight as it had been before. “They told me I met you a week ago on a mission. And then they wiped me. I shouldn’t be able to remember that.”  
   
He can tell the man doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t ask for clarification. “They were lying. You met me over 80 years ago. In a place called Brooklyn, not that far from here.”  
   
The soldier stares. He was trained to spot when people are lying. He was never as good at it as they wanted. Brooklyn sounds familiar. It sounds like sunsets and dust storms and cigarettes and somebody coughing too much.   
   
“Hydra lied to you, which means right now the only thing you really know in this world is me.”  
   
“I don’t know you.”  
   
“You know who Alexander Pierce is?”  
   
The soldier clenches his teeth. Under his skin, the shadows of pain flicker.  
   
“He pretended to be on my side. For a long time. He was lying to both of us. If you come with me, I promise I can protect you. I swear it. But we have to go right now. They’re coming, can’t you hear the sirens?”  
   
He can hear them. “Your handlers?”  
   
The man’s mouth opens and closes twice before he answers. “Yeah, my handlers. They’re generally nicer than yours, but I don’t trust them right now. They lied to me, too.”  
   
The soldier hesitates. It’s a tempting offer. He doesn’t know where he would go otherwise. Doesn’t even know where he is now. He’s always brought to where they need him to be, and then picked up when the mission is complete.  
   
“Please come with me,” the man says again. Urgent. Eyes wide.  
   
The soldier bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes metal. Then he nods.

\----

   
Steve drives his shoulder into the door, grunting in pain as his body meets an immovable force and the energy bounces back to him. His gut throbs where the bullet is still lodged in his skin. He needs to get it out soon before the serum starts to heal the skin around it and leave it trapped inside. Dying slowly of lead poising is not the most heroic way he could leave this world. He tries again, tries to body-check the door down, but he can’t. He turns to Bucky – or the Winter Soldier or whatever he’s supposed to call him now – and nods in the direction of the door.  
   
“Can you?”  
   
“Break it?”  
   
“No, just kick it open, if you can.”  
   
Bucky nods. Steve moves back out of the way as Bucky levels a forceful kick just to the left of the handle. The deadbolt bends, splintering the wood around it, and the door swings dramatically open. Steve goes inside, with Bucky following closely behind him. There’s no security system that Steve can see, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Usually Tony’s tech is invisible. For all Steve knows, he’s just tripped an alarm that goes right to SHIELD and agents will swarm the cabin in minutes. He takes the chance because he has no other choice, counting on a small sliver of possibility that maybe Tony left this place off the grid.  
   
Steve pushes the door back, but it won’t latch. “Need something to …” he mutters, mostly to himself, looking around.  
   
Bucky lifts up an armchair as if it weighs nothing at all, carrying it over and plunking it down in front of the door. Steve had meant something just to keep the door from being blown open by the wind, not that they needed to barricade themselves inside, but it works for now. Later he’ll find a better way to temporarily latch it. Exhaustion is quickly taking over, his body drained from the fight and being shot and the herculean effort it took to steal a car and get them here. He stumbles over to the kitchen, leaning heavily over the sink and spitting a mouthful of blood into it. The drive was a lot longer than he thought.  
   
“Fuck,” he breathes, head spinning from the pain and in the aftermath of disaster and the panic of not knowing what the hell he’s doing anymore. Breaking into Tony’s lake-house with a Hydra-trained assassin who barely knows himself, let alone Steve, isn’t one of Steve’s better ideas. It’s all so reckless, but Steve didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t let SHEILD take him, any more than he could let Bucky go back to Hydra. The fact that SHEILD had been so easily infiltrated isn’t an easy pill to swallow, either. Everything Peggy built. Everything she worked her whole life for, penetrated by such evil. Steve hopes no one tells her. She wouldn’t remember it for long anyway, if they did, but the few minutes of torment would be torturous, and she doesn’t deserve that.  
   
“You require maintenance.” Bucky’s voice is flat and emotionless next to him, so unlike the excitable, expressive boy he used to know. He sounds like a robot.  _Worse_ than one, Tony’s A.I. at the tower is more expressive. If Steve didn’t have a hundred other things on his mind right now, he might cry a little over that. What they’ve done to him, what they surely had to do continually to make him like this, is a horrible thought that leaves his stomach churning.  
   
“Just need to find some tweezers or something.” Steve coughs and stands back up. “Get this fucking bullet outta me.”  
   
He looks around, eyes searching for a door that might be the bathroom. Tony told him about this place years ago, but Steve’s never been here. He gave Steve directions to it, in an  _in case of emergencies_ sort of situation. Steve doubts this particular emergency is what Tony had in mind when he’d done that. He tries a couple of doors before he finds it, and luckily there is a pair of tweezers in a drawer next to the sink. He twists the faucet, running water until it’s hot and holding the tweezers underneath.  
   
In the mirror, Steve looks just about exactly how he feels. His face is blue and purple from the impact of Bucky’s metal fist. His lip is cut, and there is a deeper laceration over his eye. They’ll heal, in only a day or two because the serum accelerates it, but for now they look angry and ugly and remind obnoxiously of the moment a few hours earlier, when he’d stopped fighting back, lied there and let Bucky beat his face in. The Winter Solder might have a metal arm and long hair and guns sheathed in leather but he has Bucky’s face, and Steve couldn’t. Couldn’t hurt him. If Hydra’s aim was to find Steve’s weakness, they nailed it. Bucky was always his deal-breaker.  
   
“I can help.” Bucky appears in the doorway, holding a bottle of vodka in his metal hand that he must’ve found in the kitchen.  
   
Steve nods. “Yeah, okay.”  
   
He rips at his uniform, tearing it from the bullet hole instead of bothering to undo all the buckles and zippers. He won’t need it anymore. If SHEILD is finished, Steve has no reason to continue being Captain America. He dropped his shield, earlier, and didn’t bother finding it again before they left. He doesn’t want it back. Everything it represents is ruined.  
   
He gets enough of his stomach exposed and then sits up on the counter, wincing as he does it. Bucky comes over, unscrewing the cap on the bottle and splashing alcohol onto Steve’s wound without warning. He hisses at the sting, and closes his eyes.  
   
“Do you have a needle and thread?” Bucky asks.  
   
Steve shakes his head. “Don’t need, it’ll heal fine on its own. Just need to get the bullet out.”  
   
“Okay.” Bucky takes the tweezers from him, and Steve is expecting him to be rough, clinical about it, but Bucky’s hands are gentle. It still hurts, when he digs the tweezers into the open wound and pulls the metal out of Steve’s skin, and he grunts in pain and swears breathily once it’s over, but Bucky is surprisingly careful.  
   
“Thanks,” Steve says, wincing one last time as Bucky splashes him with vodka again, ensuring there won’t be an infection.  
   
“Where are we?” Bucky asks. His blue eyes haunt Steve. They’re so familiar, but at the same time so new and strange and different. Steve has seen laughter and frustration and ecstasy in those eyes, and now they’re blank. Like Hydra sucked everything out of Bucky and left him an empty vessel.  
   
“A friend’s place. They won’t find us,” Steve promises. He doesn’t know that. He only promises it because it feels like he has to.  
   
“Okay.”  
   
He notices, belatedly, the way Bucky is holding himself, leaned forward just slightly as if it would be painful to stand up straight. “Are you hurt?”  
   
“They would … check. Maybe bandage it.”  
   
Steve reaches out, meaning to urge Bucky closer so he can check him for injuries, but Bucky inhales sharply through his nose and backs up quickly, hitting the doorframe.  
   
“Sorry,” Steve says quickly. He curses himself internally. Of course, after everything Bucky’s been through, he can’t just reach for him like that, like he used to. He should have realized that. “Do you … need help? Like you helped me?”  
   
Bucky just stares at him, and never gives him an answer. Eyes narrowed but focused, lips a tight, unmoving line. He barely looks like Bucky at all. He looks like Bucky if he’d been an actor in a horror movie; the basic architecture of his face is recognizable but he way he holds himself, the intensity in his eyes, it’s all someone else. Someone else is behind that mask. They took Bucky, Steve’s sweet, kind, curious, brave, wonderful Bucky, and warped him into a cold-blooded killer. Bucky in Brooklyn didn’t even like killing mosquitoes. It’s all Steve can do to keep from breaking down.

\----

   
The soldier catalogues. Like he’s been taught. Makes lists, in his head, of the features and appearances of his surroundings. So he can report back. This time, he might not report back. He might never go back. But he catalogues anyway. He’s been well-trained and he doesn’t like to disappoint. They bring out the clamps, when he disappoints, that attach to his body and send fire through his veins.  
   
Wooden walls and floors. A large table with many chairs. Rounded brown leather furniture. Rooms with beds in them, and lots of pillows. Outside the windows are trees, and grass, and water. A lake, the man said, with a boat tied to a dock. He’s never been on a boat. Or maybe, he has. The soldier can’t trust his mind anymore. He thought he knew things, and was wrong about them. He thought, like he’d been told, that he met the yellow-haired man a week ago on a mission. He was certainly wrong about that. Steve, the man says his name is. The soldier agrees. He recognizes the way that name tastes on his tongue. From where or when, he doesn’t know yet. But he recognizes it.  
   
Steve paces around. He finds some rope and ties the broken door so that it can’t be opened from the outside. He moves the chair back to where the soldier had taken it from. He rubs his hands over his face, and then winces when his fingers press into the bruises the soldier had left there. Something approaching regret blooms in the soldier’s chest as he watches. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. He was always put back under so soon after completing a mission, he was never given space to think about what he’d done. Now, he wonders.   
   
He knows he’s taken lives. He was told they were bad people. People who would hurt millions if he didn’t stop them. Maybe that was a lie, too.

\----

   
“Do you want something to eat?”  
   
Bucky looks at him slowly. Blinks, twice.  
   
Steve opens the fridge and gestures at it to reinforce his words. Surely, Bucky knows what food is. Surely, they wouldn’t have knocked him out and pumped him with that nutrient paste they give to coma patients, instead of actually feeding him. Steve thinks these things, and then has to swallow back bile as he realizes he can’t really be sure of them. There is no ceiling on the nightmarish things they might have done to him. Steve remembers Brooklyn too vividly for comfort. He remembers worn shoes and sticky summers and curling into Bucky’s arms in January when their radiators weren’t enough to keep the chill out. He remembers Bucky rubbing his back through asthma attacks and pulling bullies off him when Steve started fights he couldn’t win and moving their coffee table so they could dance in the living room with the curtains drawn so they were safe. The memories hurt worse than the bullet did, because the Bucky that Steve remembers isn’t the man standing in Tony’s kitchen.  
   
Finally, Bucky nods.  
   
Steve doesn’t have the first clue what the hell he’s doing. He doesn’t know how long they can stay here, he doesn’t know if someone will figure it out and find them and what will happen when they do, he doesn’t know if he can get  _his_ Bucky back from inside this shell of a person. He doesn’t know anything, but he can make them dinner.  
   
There isn’t anything fresh in the fridge. Tony obviously hasn’t been here in a while. Steve will have to find a grocery store tomorrow, and work out how to get there and back without being recognized. He finds dry pasta and jarred marinara sauce in a low cupboard. For now, that will do. He rummages, looking for a pot and a sauce pan, as Bucky watches. He doesn’t sit, or relax, or even blink. He just stands in the doorway and watches. He’s still in his uniform, as ripped and bloody as Steve’s was only Bucky’s is black and leather and probably laced with hidden weapons. It’s highly unnerving but Steve does his best to ignore it. He boils water and salt and pours the noodles in, and heats the sauce on a smaller burner. He can feel Bucky’s eyes trained onto the back of his head, but he ignores that, too.  
   
He takes two bowls into the dining room, and Bucky follows obediently. He eats what Steve puts in front of him, quickly and methodically, as if he thinks it might be taken away before he’s finished. Steve eats slower, hoping to wordlessly communicate that Bucky could take his time if he wants to, but he doubts that message gets through. While Bucky is distracted, Steve looks at him. The Bucky he knew would have hated the long, stringy hair and stubble on his chin that this Bucky has. His rough, unkempt appearance would have been offensive to Bucky, who took pride in how he looked and always did what he could to be styled and clean and tidy even though they were poor. Steve doesn’t hate how it looks, necessarily, but he hates what it represents.  
   
When both bowls are empty, Bucky looks up at him hesitantly. Uncertainty in his eyes.  
   
Steve aches inside. There’s so much he wants to say. Finding out Bucky was still alive after decades had been hard enough to absorb. Having him here feels like a dream, or maybe a nightmare, that Steve can’t wake up from.  
   
“Who are you?” Bucky asks eventually, looking at Steve through his eyelashes with his chin turned down, like he thinks Steve is going to hit him for impudence.  
   
Steve doesn’t know how to answer. “What do you remember?”  
   
“I don’t know.”  
   
Steve takes a breath. He pushes his bowl away so he can fold his hands on the table in front of him. He’s accustomed, after his years with the Avengers, to thinking on his feet, but that ability feels lacking right now. “My name’s Steve.”  
   
“Rogers,” Bucky says suddenly.  
   
Steve’s head snaps up, and Bucky flinches. “No, that’s … right, you’re right. You remembered that.”  
   
Bucky doesn’t answer.  
   
“You knew me a long time ago,” Steve continues. “Nearly a century ago. We were friends, in a place called Brooklyn.”  
   
“You said that.”  
   
“Do you remember it?”  
   
Dry, cracked lips are licked as he contemplates it. “I remember … stairs. Metal stairs. Outside.”  
   
It takes Steve a second to figure out what he’s referring to, but then he nods enthusiastically. “The fire escape, outside our building. We used to sit out there all the time.”  
   
“Fire escape,” Bucky repeats softly, like he’s turning the phrase over in his mind.  
   
“I thought you were dead.” It isn’t what Steve should say, but it’s what comes out of his mouth.   
   
He’d grieved for Bucky, mourned him, crashed an airplane into a frozen sea in part because he knew he’d never see him again. They had plans, for after the war. They had plans to move out of the city, to buy a small farm out in the middle of nowhere. Where they’d be away from the smog and the dust that worsened Steve’s asthma, where they could be together safely free from prying eyes and judgement and the threat of violence. Steve had grieved that loss, and now Bucky is here in front of him, with a broken mind and knuckles bruised on Steve’s cheekbones and Hydra technology fastened to his shoulder. Steve’s masochistic side wants to get a better look at that arm. Wants to know in excruciating detail what they did to him.  
   
“What happened to me?”  
   
“You fell. Off a train, down into a canyon. I tried …” The words get caught in Steve’s throat. He clears it, and carries on in a pinched voice. “I tried to grab you. I couldn’t.”  
   
“You tried to save me?”  
   
“Yeah.” Steve nods, and sniffs. “Of course I did.”  
   
“You don’t look a hundred years old.”  
   
“I’m not, I …” Steve considers, how to explain. How to tell Bucky about the serum, and the ice. He decides he can’t, or at least not now, and just repeats, “I’m not.”  
   
Bucky looks momentarily like he wants to ask more, but doesn’t. He probably feels like he can’t, like he’ll be punished it he does. The thought makes Steve feel sick.  
   
“You didn’t kill me.”  
   
“I was supposed to.”  
   
“I know. But you didn’t.”  
   
“You called me Bucky.”  
   
“Yeah, that’s … well. It’s not your real name. But it’s what we called you. What should I call you now?”  
   
Bucky shakes his head. “I don’t think I had a name. You also called me James. On that machine in the sky.”  
   
“That’s your real name. The one your mother gave you.”  
   
“Bucky’s kind of stupid.”  
   
In spite of the situation, Steve laughs. Then it hurts in his chest, to recall Bucky’s sense of humor and his sarcasm and his gleeful teasing, trapped inside all this time, screaming to get out but locked up by years of programming. “It is, a little. But it suited you.”  
   
“What are you going to do with me?” Bucky asks, and then again, he flinches, expecting retribution for daring to ask.  
   
Automatically, Steve reaches for his hand. It’s a reflex, an old habit. He does it without thinking, and then instantly regrets it when Bucky recoils away from him again.  
   
“I’m sorry,” Bucky says quickly. He lays his hands back on the table, closer to Steve, the palm of his flesh one upturned. His head bows. “I won’t fight.”  
   
“Buck,” Steve mumbles. For just a moment, it was almost like he had his Bucky back, or maybe some version of his Bucky after a head-wound, trying to retrace his steps but capable of remembering sooner or later. Now the soldier sits in front of him, submissive, still, waiting for his penalty. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”  
   
Bucky remains silent.  
   
Steve wants to touch, wants to back his words up with proof, wants to take that familiar hand and thread their fingers together and show Bucky he means it, that Steve will never, ever hurt him and if he has anything to say about it, neither will anyone else. Never again. He balls his hands up in his own lap, instead. Bucky isn’t his to touch anymore.  
   
“It’s okay if you don’t believe that, yet,” he says. “But nobody is ever going to hurt you again. I promise that.”  
   
Bucky still doesn’t answer, and Steve clears their dishes, because there aren’t any more words to say.

\----

  
Steve gives him a bedroom. The soldier eyes it, not trusting. He never had a bed. There was a mat, in a cell where he stayed sometimes. Usually he didn’t sleep. Usually he stayed awake until a mission was complete and then they put him back under. He doesn’t know how he knows that. He shouldn’t be able to remember it. He’s not sure he ever did remember it, until today. The bed is large enough for more than one  
person, but Steve says it’s just for him. And a window. That makes him nervous. If he can see out, someone could see in.  
   
Steve asks if he wants to shower. The soldier doesn’t immediately respond. It makes Steve change his tone,  _telling_ the soldier to shower. That’s easier to understand. He strips out of his dirty uniform in the bathroom. There are buckles and straps and zippers, and he’s practiced in their removal. He piles various weapons on the counter. He expected Steve to follow him, to put him under the spray and clean him. They always did. But Steve leaves him alone. That might be a trap, too. The soldier keeps one eye on the closed door, just in case. The soap smells nice. Theirs always smelled like chemicals.  
   
He cautiously reopens the bathroom door with a towel around his waist, once he’s scrubbed himself clean. Steve didn’t say whether he should put his uniform back on. He finds clothes folded on the floor just outside the room. A blue shirt with long sleeves. A soft pair of pants with a drawstring around the middle. There are balled white socks on top. The soldier understands, and puts them on. They’re a little bit too small. There’s a hairbrush on the counter, and he looks in the mirror at his matted strands. He decides its safer not to, in case he isn’t supposed to.  
   
When that thought is gone, his reflection in the mirror takes his attention. It’s been a long time since he’s seen himself. The scars around his arm look worse, from this angle, when he pulls the shirt up to look at them. Raised and red and irritated. The soldier has left similar scars on others. Ones he wasn’t ordered to kill, ones who just got in his way and needed to be removed from it. His face is covered in blue and purple, like Steve’s is. His chest is, too, although it doesn’t hurt as much as it did earlier. His ribs maybe aren’t broken. Just bruised. There’s something hollow in his eyes, although he could be imagining that. He doesn’t know what his eyes  _should_ look like. Maybe they’ve always looked like this. Steve would know, if he isn’t lying about them being friends 80 years ago. The soldier doesn’t feel like he should ask.  
   
There is a soft knock at the door. The soldier jumps, startled out of his trance. He opens it quickly, remembering that eager compliance can sometimes mitigate the cruelty of the response. It’s strange, to think of his training as cruel, suddenly, when he never thought that before. He never thought of it as anything. It just was what it was.  
   
Steve is similarly redressed, in red pants checked in blue and a white shirt with shorter sleeves. It doesn’t fit him right either, stretching too tight over his arms. He’s holding something in his hand, offering it out. The soldier recognizes toothpaste, and a toothbrush, and takes them.  
   
“Still not gonna hurt you,” Steve says. His voice is quiet. He smiles, but doesn’t look pleased. “I’m not Hydra. I’m not your new … handler, or whatever they called themselves.”  
   
The soldier takes a chance. “What are you going to do?”  
   
For a moment, Steve doesn’t reply. When he does, he sounds regretful. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, I wish I had a better answer. I’m trying to figure it out on the fly. But whatever happens, you’ll be safe.”  
   
The soldier looks down at the items in his hands.  _For sensitive teeth_ , the toothpaste tube says. Soft mint. Whitening. The toothbrush is purple. “Did they lie? About the people I killed?”  
   
“What did they tell you?”  
   
“That we were saving the world.”  
   
When he looks up, Steve’s jaw is clenched and his eyes are shiny. “Yeah, Buck. They did. I’m so sorry.”  
   
The soldier nods. If none of it was true … it means he’s done so many awful things. “Do I have to keep doing that?”  
   
“No,” Steve answers, fast and a little loud. “Never, ever again.”

\----

    
The soldier sleeps on the ground. He tries the bed, but it’s too soft. It wouldn’t be safe, to be that comfortable. He’d sleep too deeply, instead of just on the edge of slumber like he’s been trained. Anyone could sneak up on him. Could slit his throat before he even opened his eyes.   
   
He dreams. There are lightening rods on sticks, and jeering faces, and pain. Voices that taunt, words that wound nearly as much as their knives. He wakes up with a gasp that stings in his lungs. Darkness greets him, stifling and thick. His heart races. His surroundings remain unfamiliar for a few terrifying seconds before he remembers.  
   
Outside the closed door, there are soft footsteps, and shadows in the light creeping in from underneath. The person stops just outside. The soldier presses his palm over his mouth and nose, to smother the sound of staggered breaths. Then the feet move away. The soldier stays in the darkened room, on the hard wooden floor. He crawls to a corner, huddles in it. He makes no further noise. He doesn’t sleep again.

\----


	2. Memory

Steve heats up canned mushroom soup for breakfast, because it’s all he can find. There is a computer in the bedroom he slept in and he located a grocery store not far from here, but has yet to figure out how he’ll go shopping while trying to stay hidden until he can figure out what to do with Bucky. There’s a chance he wouldn’t be recognized, but not a good chance, and it’s not one he can take. He maybe could send Bucky in. That’s risky too, but less so. Far fewer people know who he is, and it’s not likely they’d find Hydra agents at a store in Upstate New York. But then, if asked a few days ago, Steve wouldn’t have thought it likely they’d find Hydra agents in SHEILD. He wouldn’t have thought he’d been working with them for two years with no idea about it.  
   
Bucky is still in his bedroom. Steve doesn’t disturb him. He’d been dreaming, the night before, Steve gathered by the moans and the harsh breathing he’d overheard on his way to the bathroom. He’d wanted to burst into the room, half to make sure it really was just a dream and he wasn’t being attacked, and half to comfort him, but then the noises had stopped and Steve had walked away. He’d checked the whole house over twice, and circled its perimeter outside, just to be sure. He hadn’t slept much after that. They’re vulnerable, here. Bucky had weapons on him, three knives and two handguns strapped to him with leather and buckles, and they’re now in the closet in Steve’s room because he doesn’t know the code to unlock the safe where he assumes Tony has a small arsenal. Steve had nothing. He usually carries a knife or two, but they’d been lost in the fight on the helicarrier. And his shield is probably halfway to the ocean by now, floating away down the river Bucky had pulled him from.  
   
Steve is heading down the hall back toward the bedroom he’d chosen, when the door to Bucky’s opens. It’s bad timing. Bucky is startled, not expecting to find Steve standing there, and he reacts on instinct. He grabs Steve and throws him into the wall, pinning him there with his metal arm pressed across Steve’s chest.  
   
“Whoa, it’s me!” Steve cries, hands up. “Buck, it’s just me.”  
   
Bucky breathes heavily through his nose, his eyes wide and wild. They search Steve’s face, and after a moment he loosens his grip a little, although doesn’t let it go entirely. “What do you want?”  
   
Steve shakes his head, not understanding the question.  
   
“Why did you bring me here?” Bucky asks, with increased pressure to Steve’s chest.  
   
“Because I couldn’t let them take you. They might have killed you.”  
   
“What about you? Keeping me here.”  
   
“I can’t make you stay. I hope you do, but I can’t make you.”  
   
“This is the test? Giving me a bed, making me food, so when you strike I’m off guard? You think they didn’t train me to know better?”  
   
Steve shakes his head. He has no idea how to get the message through, short of just repeating it over and over until Bucky really hears it. “No. No test, no strikes. I’m not gonna hurt you.”  
   
“Maybe I’m gonna hurt  _you_.”  
   
Steve swallows nervously, and nods. Accepting his fate seemed to work, yesterday on the helicarrier. Telling Bucky he wouldn’t fight back, that he’d surrender and let Bucky do whatever he needed to do, had helped pull him back. “Okay. I don’t think you really want to. But I won’t try to stop you.”  
   
Bucky glares at him, eyes still moving back and forth, looking for signs of dishonesty on Steve’s face. He looks so scared, underneath the anger, and it breaks Steve’s heart. It isn’t a look he’s ever seen before on Bucky’s face. Bucky used to be all sunshine and smiles and easy laughs. This broken, haunted, wounded animal, Steve doesn’t know. Finally, he roughly lets go, and steps back.  
   
Steve rubs at his chest and nods toward the kitchen. “There’s soup. And crackers. I know it’s not normal breakfast food, but it’s what I could find.”  
   
Without another word, Bucky walks away in that direction. He looks so much less lethal in Tony’s sweatpants than he had in his full tactical gear, but the fingers on his metal hand still glint in the early morning sunlight. Steve exhales and lets his head tip back to knock against the drywall. He swears under his breath. He’s so completely out of his depth this time.

\----

    
The lake is calm. There is a fine mist floating over the water, wisps of white dancing on its glass surface, moving slowly through the still air. The soldier stands, at the end of a wooden dock, staring out over it. His hands are in the pockets of the coat Steve had given him. It’s too small on him, like everything else, and it bunches over his shoulders. While Steve was in the bathroom, the soldier had snuck into his bedroom and took back his weapons. The guns he’d left in his own bedroom – for now. Two knives he’d strapped back to his legs underneath the pants he’s wearing. Their leather holsters are uncomfortable against his bare skin but at the same time a comforting, familiar weight. He’s safer, with them on him. He could defend himself, if his new captor turned on him. Others did.  
   
Steve, who gave him a bedroom and cooked for him and didn’t ask for anything as payment. At least, not yet. Who keeps promising the soldier is safe here. That remains to be seen. It’s only been 24 hours. The soldier does know him. It would be easier if he didn’t, but he does. Steve’s eyes … they bring back the flickers of memories, crackly music, tattered furniture, small hands with bruised knuckles, somebody crying softly as a coffin is lifted into the back of a black car. He isn’t used to remembering things from long ago that he doesn’t understand. He’s used to receiving orders, and following them, and then having everything ripped from his brain with the lightening chair.  
   
The platform creaks behind him, and he turns, rapid and ready, hands raised.  
   
“Just me,” Steve says again. He stops moving for a second, allowing the soldier to abandon his fight stance before he continues approaching. There are white mugs in his hands, steaming in the cool morning air. When he gets close enough, he holds one out. “Coffee?”  
   
“What’s coffee?” the soldier asks, eyeing it warily.  
   
“Oh.” Steve looks pained, and pulls his arm back so the cup is closer to his body. “Sorry, I … you used to like it. It didn’t occur to me you wouldn’t remember.”  
   
The soldier hesitates, but then holds his hand out. Steve gives him the mug. It’s warm in his flesh hand. He sniffs it. It does smell familiar.  
   
“I promise it’s not poison.”  
   
“Why should I believe you?”  
   
Steve shrugs. “You shouldn’t, I guess.”  
   
The soldier squints at it. They only gave him water. It was never brown and hot.  
   
“Here.” Steve takes a sip from the mug in his own hand. Then he moves a step closer, and takes the one from the soldier’s away, and sips from that one, too. “See? Not poison.”  
   
The soldier keeps his eyes narrowed, searching Steve’s face. He takes the mug back and sips, more out of defiance than trust. It’s bitter, and he grimaces.  
   
Steve smiles, and then he laughs, and shakes his head. “Yeah, you’re right. Definitely gross without milk. We’ll get some, for tomorrow.” When he sees the soldier confused, he adds, “right, you don’t know what milk is either. That’s okay. One step at a time.”  
   
“Who died?” the soldier asks. He drinks the coffee anyway, because it’s warm, and because the second and third sips aren’t so bad, once he’s used to it.  
   
Steve tilts his head and frowns.  
   
“I remember a coffin. In the rain. And … sad people. And you … you were supposed to be with me, but you left.” It all comes tumbling back, the moment he starts speaking it out loud. “Where did you go?”  
   
“Oh.” Steve inhales slowly and lets it out through his nose. “My mother, I guess. You remember her funeral.”  
   
“Funeral?”  
   
“When somebody dies, people who loved them go to a church together, to, uh, remember them. And say some prayers to make sure they get into heaven.”  
   
The soldier doesn’t understand that, but doesn’t question it. It’s clear there will be many things he doesn’t understand. “The people I killed. Did they have funerals?”  
   
Steve nods. “Probably.”  
   
He wants to scream and hurl the mug into the lake. He doesn’t.  
   
“Hey, I need to ask you a favor. I ordered some groceries, from a store not far from here. We need to go pick them up, but I can’t go in. I’ll be recognized, so you gotta do it.”  
   
“Recognized?”  
   
“God, how do I explain this. I’m famous, a little bit. If I go in there people might know who I am, and then they might find us. My people, or Hydra.”  
   
The soldier stays silent; waits for instructions.  
   
“It’s already paid for,” Steve continues. “I’ll drive you, wait for you around the back. You just need to find the desk that says ‘customer service’, tell them you’re picking up an order for Grant Stevens. They’ll bring the boxes out to you.”  
   
“Who’s Grant Stevens?”  
   
“Nobody, it’s a made-up name.”  
   
“What’s to stop me from running away?”  
   
Steve looks tired, shrugs again. “Nothing, Buck. Nothing’s stopping you from running away right now, either. Like I said, I’m not keeping you here. I’d like you to stay, I’d like to help you get your life back. But I’m not making you do anything.”  
   
He’s either telling the truth, or he’s an exceptionally good liar. Either way, the soldier doesn’t know where he is, or how he would survive on his own, so he doesn’t have much choice in the matter. He can only hope that when this man turns, he’s kinder than the others.  
   
“I had an idea, actually, speaking of that.” Steve leans down to set his mug on the dock, and then he hops down onto it, sitting with his legs hanging over the side and the tips of his toes nearly touching the water.   
   
The soldier cautiously sits next to him, although a safe distance away. Reaching into his pocket, Steve pulls out a small green square and a pen.   
   
“These are called Post-its. You write on them, and then you tear one sheet off, and, see? They have a sticky edge, so you can put them on something and they’ll stay.” He does it as he narrates, peeling off the top layer and handing it over so the soldier can feel the tacky strip at the top. “I thought you could write things down, when you remember them. Put them up on the wall in your room, so you can start piecing everything together.”  
   
“What do they do?”  
   
“They don’t do anything, they’ll just be there on your wall and you can look at them. I’ll start, okay?” Steve takes the pen and writes on the top of the pad in his hand. He shows the soldier once he’s done.  
 

_James Buchanan Barnes_

_“Bucky”_

   
The soldier considers it. The name still sounds a little foreign, although not as much as it did the first time he heard it. He holds his hand out for the pen, and Steve gives it to him. “Your middle name is Grant.”  
   
Steve’s eyes do something funny. “Yeah, it is.”  
   
The soldier nods, and puts the small paper on his leg so he can write  _Steven Grant Rogers_ on it.   
   
Steve looks pleased. He offers the rest of the pad for the soldier to take. “Fire escape,” he says. “And funeral.”  
   
“Right.” The soldier nods, and writes those down too.  
   
“My mother’s name was Sarah.”  
   
_Sarah_. The soldier can hear it. If he unfocuses his gaze, he can almost see her. Kind eyes and wispy hair and a big smile as she scooped a little blond boy up in her arms, kissing his face as he squirmed to get away. “That sounds familiar.”  
   
Steve’s face is crinkled into a genuine smile. He reaches over, the soldier sees the hand coming at him out of the corner of his eye and jumps, instinctive, heart leaping and launching himself backwards to get away from it. He knocks the mug behind him over, and coffee spills onto the dock.  
   
“Sorry!” Steve cries. He pulls his hands back. “Shit, sorry. I didn’t …”  
   
“I’ll do better,” the soldier breathes, that coming up instinctively too.  
   
“You didn’t do anything, I wasn’t …” Steve swears again, and shuts his eyes for a moment. His hands curl into fists in his lap. “You don’t like being touched. Message received, alright, I won’t try it again. I just forgot, for a second.”  
   
The Post-it that says  _Funeral_ floats away on the water below their feet.  
   
“God, Buck,” Steve sighs, looking forlornly at it as it drifts off. “What did they do to you?”  
   
He doesn’t know how, but he’s ruined it. The soldier gets up, and leaves Steve alone on the dock. He doesn’t want to make it worse. He takes the Post-its and the pen with him, though, and back in his bedroom, writes a few more things down.  _Brooklyn_ , and  _Best Friends_. He puts them up on the wall, like Steve had suggested, and sits on the edge of the bed, staring at them. 

\----

   
The grocery pick-up goes better than Steve is expecting. He finds baseball caps for them both, and gloves for Bucky to cover the metal hand. He waits in the alley like he’d said he would, with sunglasses on and his collar popped up to hide his face as best he can. He’s anxious as he sits there, aware of how risky this is even though according to everyone but himself, Natasha and Sam, and a few Hydra agents, James Barnes has been dead for 69 years, so the chances of him being recognized are microscopic. It’s only a few tense minutes later that Bucky comes back out with a stack of cardboard boxes in his arms. He loads them into the backseat, and then joins Steve in the front.  
   
“No problems?” Steve asks, putting the car back in gear and pulling out of the alley. He doesn’t mention it, but the fact that Bucky  _didn’t_ take off even though he’d warned Steve that he might, has hope sprouting tentatively in Steve’s stomach. He should push it down, and not let it grow any larger. He still doesn’t have a damn clue what he’s doing, and no reason at all to think this whole thing will end in anything less than disaster. But he’s made it clear twice that he isn’t keeping Bucky prisoner, that he could leave if he wanted to, and Bucky hasn’t left.  
   
“Nope,” Bucky says in an emotionless voice. “Easy.”  
   
Steve nods. “Good.”  
   
He rubs spices into chicken breasts to grill for lunch, now that he has fresh ingredients to work with. Sam taught him a recipe, months ago, with paprika and pepper and lime juice. He hands Bucky a kitchen knife and asks him to chop vegetables for a salad. Bucky narrows his eyes as he takes it from Steve’s hands, like he’s wondering if it’s another test. Like he thinks Steve is expecting him to use it as a weapon, and is testing whether he will. Steve isn’t doing that at all, but it’s okay if Bucky thinks it. It’s good for Bucky to see that Steve trusts him. He knows Bucky already took his other knives back, and the guns as well. Steve’s alright with that, too. Maybe he’s an idiot, just being reckless as always, but his gut says if Bucky wanted to hurt him, he would’ve done it already. He’s had plenty of opportunity. He’d grabbed Steve that morning because he was startled, and had acted instinctively. That’s all. After what he’s been through, Steve can’t blame him.  
   
Bucky slowly slices the green peppers and tomatoes Steve gives him. It brings back memories that throb like heartburn in Steve’s chest. They used to prepare dinner together all the time, in their apartment before the war. This should have been their life after it, too. They should have found a place just like this, out in the country, surrounded by tall trees and endless blue skies.  
   
Bucky should have been safe. Steve should have kept him safe.

\----

   
Bucky spends the rest of the afternoon in his room. He gets up after they eat and wanders away, and Steve hears a door shut. He leaves him be. Cleans up from their meal, puts the rest of the groceries away. He finds more clothes in Tony’s closet, and divides them up, leaving a small pile of jeans and shirts and socks and underwear outside Bucky’s door. He feels badly, taking all Tony’s things without being able to ask if he can, but he doesn’t know what other options they have. Groceries were risky enough, he can’t take them clothes shopping.  
   
He pauses and listens through the door, just for a moment, and only silence greets him.  
   
Back in his own bedroom, Steve lets himself cry a little. He’s overwhelmed, and so scared he won’t be able to make this work. If they’re discovered, if Bucky is taken away from him again and Steve can’t stop it, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. He swears and lies back onto the bed, angrily wiping tears from his face. In another lifetime, the person he’d turn to in a mess like this is  _Bucky_. He always knew what to do, he was always pulling Steve out of scraps by the collar of his shirt, taking him home, patiently listening to him rant and rave about all the injustices in the world and then pulling him in close and making him forget them. Steve rolls onto his side, and curls in on himself. This time, he’s alone.

\----

   
There is a mirror, in the room Steve had given him, above a desk in the corner. The soldier sits on the wooden chair and stares into it. He tucks his hair behind his ears, untucks it, gathers it up in a handful at the back of his head, and lets it down. He pokes at the dark circles under his eyes. He pulls his lips back to examine his teeth; straight and white and evenly spaced. Steve’s are too, he’d noticed, when he smiled earlier. Before he’d reached over and the soldier had reacted and broken the moment. He tugs at the collar of his shirt, examining the scarring around the metal arm again, like he’d done the night before in the bathroom. He gets nothing out of looking at it, so he lets his shirt move back over it.  
   
“Bucky,” he says, quietly. Then a little louder, looking himself right in the eyes. “You’re Bucky.”  
   
It doesn’t sound right, but it doesn’t sound wrong either. It doesn’t sound like anything. Steve sounds right, when he thinks it and pictures his face.  
   
“Bucky,” he says once more, and tries to assign it to himself and keep it.  
   
The name  _Rebecca_ pops into his head. He blinks and thinks about it, but gets nothing else. He gets up, finding the Post-its where he’d left them on his bed, and writing it down. He has three more, since this morning.  _Commandos_ ,  _pencils_ , and  _sky wheel._ None of them make any sense to him. He keeps getting words in flashes, abstract and devoid of context. He writes them down, and then stares at them, trying desperately to remember. He does the same with  _Rebecca_ , but can’t bring anything else to the surface other than a blurry image of a freckled nose. He puts it on the wall anyway, hoping more will come to him in time.  
   
Time is not a given. He doesn’t know how much of it they’ll have. And he’s worried, about how quickly Steve will lose patience with him, if he doesn’t remember more.  
   
He lies back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Turning the words over in his mind.  _Rebecca, Rebecca._ The wheel in the sky. That one makes the least sense. He must be making it up, somewhere in his fractured consciousness. It doesn’t sound like it could be real. But then, Steve had explained to him earlier what a microwave is, and a television, and a computer. He didn’t know what those things were either.  
   
It feels like only seconds later when he’s gasping, eyes snapping open and bolting upright, but the world outside his window is dark. He scrambles sideways, surroundings unfamiliar, and slips, crashing to the floor and landing painfully on his shoulder.  
   
“Bucky?” There’s knocking outside his door. “Are you okay?”  
   
He pants, blinking around in the darkness, but he recognizes Steve’s voice. It calms him a little, even though his heart still races.  
   
“Fell out of bed,” he says, wincing uncomfortably as he gets up off the floor.  
   
“Oh,” Steve’s voice answers. “I … okay.”  
   
“You can come in,” the soldier says.  
   
The door opens slowly, revealing Steve with a worried frown on his face. “Are you hurt?”  
   
“No.”  
   
Steve nods, and doesn’t look convinced. He doesn’t push the subject. “It’s interesting, what you know and what you don’t,” he muses, almost to himself.  
   
“Like what?”  
   
“Like … you know what a bed is. But not what coffee is.”  
   
The soldier nods. He hears the disappointment, and tries to swallow it. Pleasing his handlers was the only thing that ever got him out of programming. If he’d run a mission especially seamlessly, they’d let him rest, first. They’d give him something good to eat, sometimes. Or bathe him gently.  
   
Steve notices. “I’m not mad at you. Not at all. Just … thinking out loud. Sorry.”  
   
“Can you …” he begins, but then stops. He has no right to be asking for anything.  
   
“Go on,” Steve encourages. He gives the soldier that smile again, and it’s so tempting. He wants so much to believe in it.  
   
“Turn on the light? I want to show you something.”  
   
“Of course,” Steve says. He does it, flooding the room in light.  
   
The soldier points at the wall, where the green notes are hung up in a neat row.  
   
Steve comes into the room a little more so he can see, and his face does the thing it did earlier on the dock; raised eyebrows, glittery eyes, parted lips.  
   
“I don’t know what they mean,” the soldier says. “But I remembered them.”  
   
Steve sits on the edge of the bed, looking at them. “Rebecca is your little sister. Or, was.”  
   
“She’s gone?”  
   
“Most of the people we knew in Brooklyn are gone. It was a long time ago.” When the soldier doesn’t react, Steve continues. “Commandos … your unit from the war. The Howling Commandos. You were their Sergeant. I joined you, once I got there.”  
   
“What’s a Sergeant?”  
   
“It means you were their leader. You were great at it.” Steve smiles at him.  
   
“I don’t remember.”  
   
“That’s okay. You will.” He looks back at the wall. “I don’t know what pencils means. I’ll have to think about that one. And a sky wheel … not sure what that is either.”  
   
“It might not mean anything. Maybe my head is making things up.”  
   
Steve tilts his head a little, and considers it for a minute, before he inhales and his eyebrows raise up higher. “The Ferris Wheel. At Coney Island. It was a ride, it … shit, how do I explain rides?”  
   
“Wait.” The soldier frowns. Images flash in his mind. Long boardwalks, water that disappeared past the horizon. Kids laughing and running around. Spinning in a small metal car. Steve next to him. He knows it’s Steve, although he doesn’t look the way he does now. He’s much shorter, and thinner. Maybe they were kids. “I remember that.”  
   
“You do?” Steve asks hopefully.  
   
The soldier nods. “It went way up in the sky, you could see the whole pier from the top.”  
   
“Yeah.” Another smile. “It wasn’t that far from where we lived. We went there all the time, in the summer. When we had a few extra bucks to burn.”  
   
He sits on the bed as well, not close to Steve, and blinks, staring into the space in front of him as other images crystalize in his head. Ice cream cones, sunshine, Steve’s golden hair.  
   
“More stuff is gonna come back,” Steve tells him. “You’ll see. Hydra took your life away, your identity, but they couldn’t erase it completely. It’s still in there, and it’ll come back.”  
   
The soldier nods.  _Bucky_ nods. “Okay.”

\----

    
Bucky is quiet, the day after. He barely speaks, and he spends a lot of time staring into space, and it hurts to see him looking so lost but Steve tries not to hover, tries to leave him alone. He can’t imagine what’s happening inside Bucky’s head, decades of brainwashing colliding with memories old and new, likely resulting in a hurricane that he can’t calm. He wants to help, wants to talk through every thought and memory and question, to help Bucky make sense of them, but he also doesn’t want to push too hard and make him shut down.  
   
The day after is worse. Steve tells him to shower again because he can smell the sweat on his scalp from across the room, and Bucky balks at being ordered, and then panics, frantically apologizing and rushing to the bathroom and staying in the shower stall for a long time. He’s bright pink when he comes out, like he’d scrubbed himself almost raw, and Steve has to clench his teeth against a wave of nausea. He tries to promise he isn’t angry, that Bucky didn’t do anything wrong, but the words sound hollow in his own ears and Bucky clearly doesn’t believe him. He’s jumpy the rest of the day, easily startled and fear shining in his eyes every time they’re in the same room, clearly expecting this to be the moment Steve turns into what he’s used to and starts punishing him.   
   
Steve fights back more nausea as his imagination runs wild, conjuring up the sorts of ways Hydra might have done that. Bucky was tortured by Hydra the first time in 1943, when they’d captured him during the war. Bucky wouldn’t talk about it at the time, after Steve got him out. He’d tried, he’d tried so many times, but Bucky had brushed it off. He never managed to shake the haunted look from his eyes that gave away the nature of what had been done to him.  
   
In the darkness of the evening, Bucky sits in a chair in the living room, flipping one of his knives in his flesh hand. He tosses it in the air over and over and catches it, staring at it as he does. Steve watches him apprehensively, and Bucky makes eye contact, and he isn’t Bucky, in that moment. He looks like the man Steve faced on the helicarrier. Dark eyes, emotionless and dangerous, barely blinking. He glares, and a muscle works in his jaw. He looks like he’s daring Steve to come closer, baiting him to see what happens if he tries it. Steve finds a second pad of Post-its in Tony’s desk, these ones orange. He writes  _Bucky_ on one, and sticks it to the couch across the room where he knows the soldier can see it. He leaves it there, and heads to his bedroom.  
   
He lies awake for a long time, and never hears movement outside the door.

\----

    
Bucky takes to sitting outside, on the lawn in front of the house. He sits for hours, sometimes, motionless and staring out at the lake. Steve wants to sit with him, and doesn’t. He watches from the front windows. He watches the tension in Bucky’s shoulders, and the breeze lifting his hair off his neck. On their fifth day, Steve is reading in the living room and happens to look up at Bucky cross-legged in the grass, notices two chipmunks approaching him. Bucky’s head turns, noticing them too. They stare at him for a minute, before they inch closer. Slowly, Bucky reaches out with his metal arm, laying it palm-up on the ground. The chipmunks retreat a few feet, but then inch closer again when he stays still. One crawls right into his hand.  
   
Steve stands up slowly and moves closer to the window to watch. He holds his breath, even though he’s inside and can’t be heard anyway. Bucky’s metal fingers move slowly, one fingertip touching the side of the one in his hand. After another minute, they both scurry off. Steve blinks the sudden sting of tears out of his eyes. Bucky used to love animals so much. He should have been a veterinarian, if they’d ever had the money to send him to school for it. He was always so gentle with them, taking care of stray dogs in their neighborhood and doting on a neighbor’s cat. Steve sniffs and wipes angrily at his face. None of this is fair, and he’s so scared he’s screwing up and making it worse. Everything is so fragile. One wrong step and he could shatter it all.

\----

   
Steve is out.  _For a jog,_ he’d said. The soldier doesn’t know, and doesn’t ask. He suspects Steve is tiring of having to answer questions like that. The soldier certainly should know what it is, and it must be irritating that he doesn’t. He’s on the couch, trying to figure out the television. Steve had demonstrated the use of the remote, a few days ago, but the soldier can’t completely remember which buttons he’s supposed to press. The big red one at the top turns it on. The ones with the arrows are for the noise. He randomly presses a few more, and the screen changes suddenly. It had been a plain blue screen and silence, and then it’s guns, and men running, and fire.  
   
The soldier freezes. He watches, and memories surround him. Wild eyes, screaming mouths, begging. A woman and two little girls, huddled in a dark corner. A man kneels before him, pleading,  _I have a family, you don’t have to do this_. But the soldier does have to do it, so he does. The trigger is easy to pull, the echoing boom of the gun louder in his ears than their screams.  
   
“Bucky?”  
   
He jumps, drawing air so quickly into his lungs it burns, looking up. Someone is hovering over him. He’s on the floor. “Don’t,” he rasps, scrambling back, clambering to his feet and backing away. “I had to.”  
   
“… had to what?”  
   
“I had to!” he shouts. “Did you think it was optional? Did you think they were  _asking_?”  
   
The person breathes heavily. After blinking two or three times, the soldier recognizes him. It’s not them. It’s Steve. His eyes are wide and his hands are up again. They’re always up, they’re always raised out in front of his chest like he thinks the soldier is  _afraid_ of him. Afraid of a man without weapons, without an army. It’s laughable.  
   
“Bucky …”  
   
The soldier ignores him. He remembers the bedroom he’s been given, and he goes to it, slamming the door behind him.  
   
The world slowly, slowly rights itself. He lies on the floor for a long time, maybe three hours, and piece by piece, reality is reorganized and something approaching clarity returns. He remembers the cabin. He remembers the river, pulling Steve out of it and Steve stealing a car to take them away from that place. He remembers Steve promising they’re safe here. Remembers wanting to believe him.  
   
He remembers  _hospital_. Bringing his hands up to his head, he squeezes until it hurts, trying to either push the memory back to wherever it came from, or coax more details to the forefront. He gets neither. He sits up, finds the Post-its, and adds it to the wall. To his ridiculous, pathetic wall of memory fragments that never expand on their own, until Steve gives him more details. He needs Steve.  
   
He finds him, on the front porch. The sun is setting, painting purple and orange swirls over the clouds in the sky. Steve is sitting in a wooden chair, a glass of something clear and amber in his hand, slouched back with his legs stretched out in front of him. He doesn’t look up as the soldier enters, but he does sniff and wipe his nose with the back of his hand.  
   
The soldier feels … something. Something he doesn’t understand and has no name for.  
   
“I’m sorry,” he tells Steve.  
   
“It’s not your fault, Buck,” Steve answers, automatically.  
   
He’s always saying that. The soldier wishes he wouldn’t.  
   
He drags another chair over and sits next to Steve, a little closer than he would have yesterday. His flesh hand tingles. The soldier recognizes it as a want to touch. To reach out and curl his fingers over Steve’s elbow, to feel if his skin is warm, if there’s a pulse underneath it, if he’s really real and here. He knows he isn’t allowed to. He clenches his hands into fists, instead, and keeps them in his lap.

\----

    
Steve is brushing his teeth, when he hears a crash. He calls out Bucky’s name around a mouthful of minty foam, and when he doesn’t get a response he spits quickly into the sink and drags the back of his hand over his mouth as he hurries toward the source of the noise.  
   
He finds Bucky on the kitchen floor, knelt over white pieces of a dish. His hands are shaking, hovering over the shards. He breathes, “I’m sorry,” as Steve approaches. “It slipped, I was trying to wash it.”  
   
Steve walks up slowly, not wanting to rush at him and scare him. He lowers himself carefully to his knees. “It’s okay. It’s just a bowl, it doesn’t matter.”  
   
“I didn’t mean to,” Bucky says. He won’t look up. His long hair hangs over his face, blocking his eyes.  
   
Steve swallows. Bucky’s flesh hand is clenched around one of the pieces so tightly there’s blood dripping onto the floor. Tentatively, glacier slow so Bucky has every opportunity to stop him, to shove him away, Steve reaches out. When Bucky doesn’t flinch, he lightly brushes his fingertips over Bucky’s wrist. “Open your hand. You’re cutting yourself.”  
   
Bucky breathes harshly and doesn’t move.  
   
“Bucky. I’m not angry. I know it was an accident. It’s just a bowl. We’ll replace it, no problem at all.”  
   
When he still gets no answer, Steve pets gently at Bucky’s trembling wrist, moves his fingers down over Bucky’s tight fist, tries to coax him to relax.  
   
“Please let go?”  
   
Finally he does, releasing the tight curl of his fingers and revealing an inch-wide chunk of porcelain covered in blood. Steve takes it out of his palm, carefully picking out a few small pieces left behind in the wound. He takes the dish towel off the hook below the sink, pressing it into Bucky’s palm and wrapping it up to stop the bleeding. Bucky lets him, doesn’t fight being touched for the first time. It’s been nine days, of Steve itching constantly to touch like they used to, and holding it all inside. Steve’s heart is beating so loudly he’s sure it must be audible in the quiet room. The moment feels fraught and so, so breakable.  
   
“I promise you can trust me,” he says softly. “I promise, Bucky. I will never hurt you. The things Hydra did to you are never going to happen again as long as I’m here. I will never make you do anything you don’t want to do. I will never make you hurt anyone else.”  
   
“I’m not him,” is all Bucky says. His hands are still shaking, and he’s still staring down at the broken bowl with long strands of hair falling into his face.  
   
Steve slides the jagged pieces out of the way. “Who?”  
   
“The person you lost.” Bucky does finally look up at him, with horrible sadness swimming in his eyes. “Your friend. Your Bucky. I’m not him. He’s gone. He might never come back.”  
   
“That’s okay.” Steve lets go of Bucky’s hand. He takes what feels like an incredibly treacherous risk and reaches his hand out to brush Bucky’s hair back off his forehead. Bucky doesn’t resist that, either, and it’s so miraculous Steve can hear angels sing. At the same time he’s devastated, because he doesn’t know if this is Bucky finally trusting him, or if he’s just been worn down and lost the will to fight back.  
   
Bucky shakes his head, and repeats, “he might never come back. You might go through all this work, helping me get them out of my head, helping me remember the before, and he still might not come back. Not completely.”  
   
“I’m not the person I was back then, either,” Steve says. He leaves his fingers in Bucky’s hair. “I know it’s not the same. I wasn’t brainwashed. I never had my identity taken away. But I’m different, too. We can’t go back in time, we can’t change what’s happened. We just … go forward. As who we are now. Together.”  
   
“I’m not worth this. You have to know that. I’m not even fully human anymore, what if everything that was ever any good about me is gone forever? What if you’re risking everything and in the end it turns out you’ll never get Bucky back anyway?”  
   
It’s the most he’s spoken since they’ve been here – the most he’s heard Bucky’s voice in one sitting since 1945. Once, in another lifetime, Steve had been sick with pneumonia, shortly after they’d moved in together. Bucky had sat at his bedside one night when he thought Steve was asleep. He’d babbled for ten minutes straight while Steve kept his eyes closed and his breathing even so he wouldn’t break the spell,  _please don’t leave me Stevie_ , and  _I love you_ , and  _you can’t leave me alone, not when I just got you like this_.  
   
“I’m not risking it for the Bucky I lost,” he promises, their faces close together. “I’m risking it for you.” 

\----


	3. Visitor

He can’t sleep again. The soldier –  _Bucky,_ he’s trying to call himself Bucky – rolls over on the floor, and considers the bed. He wants to trust Steve. He wants to trust that if he climbed into that big bed and really slept, soundly and comfortably, he’d be okay when he woke up in the morning. He isn’t quite there, yet. It’s still too risky. He’s been taught: stay alive. Reveal nothing, but stay alive.  
   
_Worthless_ , his head says.  
   
Steve hasn’t treated him like he’s worthless. Steve had bandaged his hand and touched his hair, and Bucky had let him. It had felt okay. In that one moment, he hadn’t been expecting Steve to turn and slap him, or scream at him, or demand he make up for his mistake. Steve with his kind, familiar eyes and his gentle words and his promises. All his tempting, tantalizing promises. Bucky longs to believe in them. He wants to believe he doesn’t have to fight anymore. He wants to believe everything he remembers from before is real, and not yet another mind game meant to control him into compliance. He wants to believe he knew Steve Rogers, and trusted Steve Rogers. But it wouldn’t be the first time he’s believed in something and had it all turn out to be just more lies.  
   
Bucky gets up. He leaves his room quietly, tiptoeing down the hall with practiced stealth, to the kitchen. He can’t fix his broken head but he can fix the bowl. His punishment for breaking it is still coming, that much he’s sure of. It’s only being delayed to add fearful anticipation to the impact. But maybe if he fixes it, his new handler will show him shades of mercy. He digs the pieces out of the garbage can, rinsing bits of food and coffee grounds off of them in the sink. He needs something to bind them together. The back of his mind helpfully supplies the word  _glue_ , and he goes off in search of some. It takes a few minutes, but he finds a plastic device that says  _hot glue gun_ on it, in a closet with a broom and other cleaning supplies.  
   
Fitting the pieces back together is more difficult than he’s expecting. Certain edges match, but then don’t match on the other side, and he has to keep rotating them before he solves it. He should have been expecting the clear ooze from the gun to be hot once he plugs it in, but he isn’t, and a glob of it on his finger burns and he swears out loud and peels it off too quickly, leaving an exposed strip of skin. Annoyed, he runs it under cool water to dull the sting. Once it lessens, he picks the gun up again, and this time carefully lays a strip of glue along the edge of the first piece.  
   
“Bucky?”  
   
Steve’s voice startles him. He’s losing his abilities, lulled into a false sense of security by this place and by the lack of frequent programming. He jumps, swearing again as the glue gun clatters to the floor.  
   
“What are you doing?” Steve asks, with a curious tilt of his head. Soft and endlessly patient, in a way that just has to be a trap. It’s a long game he’s playing.  
   
“I …” Bucky gestures toward the broken pieces on the counter. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”  
   
He crouches down for the gun, and scrapes some dried bits of glue off the floor.  
   
Steve is still just looking at him, furrowed brow and sad eyes. Then he goes over to the cupboard and takes out a bowl like the one Bucky broke. Without hesitation he throws it down. It hits the tile and shatters into even more pieces than Bucky’s. He starts involuntarily at the noise it makes and stares in horror at the shards.  
   
“There,” Steve says. “We’re even now.”  
   
Bucky breathes through his nose and can’t tear his eyes away from the mess of white dust.   
   
“They’re just things, Bucky. Things break sometimes. Accidents happen. It doesn’t matter.”  
   
He can’t process that. He tries, but his mind won’t make sense of it. Instead he goes back to his task, laying hot glue down along edges and pressing pieces back together. He’s still breathing too hard, but he manages mostly to keep his hands from shaking.  
   
Steve moves in closer, and picks up one of Bucky’s pieces. “Okay,” he says gently. “Okay, if it matters to you to fix this one, let’s do that. You’re right, even if it wouldn’t hold liquid anymore after we put it back together, it could still be good for something else.”  
   
The end result isn’t perfect. There are holes in it, spaces where the material had broken into pieces too fine to be re-glued, but it still looks like a bowl. Good for something else, like Steve said. Not for soup or cereal, but something. Bucky feels marginally better. Steve touches his wrist again. Small, gentle brushes of his fingers over Bucky’s skin, just briefly and then his hand falls away. Bucky’s skin tingles afterwards.   
   
It doesn’t hurt, when Steve touches him.

\----

 

The little striped animals come back, when he sits on the grass the next day. He doesn’t know what they’re called. He should look it up – Steve had shown him how to use the computer in his bedroom so he could do something called Google things if he has questions Steve doesn’t know the answers to. They’re small, brown with black and white stripes down their backs, and tiny hands. If he sits still enough for long enough, they approach him, and if he lays his hand out and leaves it there, sometimes they climb right into his palm. Today he lifts one up, to examine it closer. It sits, looking around curiously, in his metal hand. It’s so, so small. He’s ended so many lives with this hand. Wrapped the metal fingers around throats and squeezed until the light went out of bloody eyes. Pulled triggers on automatic weapons and sprayed bullets into a crowd. He could curl the fingers together and crush this fragile being in his palm. It would take no effort at all. He could, but he doesn’t want to. And the animal doesn’t know any better, so it trusts that he won’t.  
   
When he goes back inside, Steve is in the kitchen. Bucky holds out his metal hand. Steve frowns at him, confused for a moment before he figures out what Bucky’s after. It’s an experiment, and Bucky isn’t sure how it will end, but when Steve steps forward and wraps both his hands around Bucky’s metal one, fingers sliding slowly over the plates that make up the palm, Bucky feels no urge to wound. He doesn’t want to crush Steve’s hands, to throw him off, to wrap around his throat. He moves the fingers, touching back, just for a moment before he pulls away.  
   
“Okay?” Steve asks, smiling tentatively.  
   
Bucky nods.  
   
They watch a cartoon movie about a mermaid who wants to be human, after the sun goes down. Bucky sits close to Steve on the couch, not touching but close enough to feel warmth radiating off of him. Halfway through the movie, Steve’s hand settles on Bucky’s knee. The touch ripples through him, spreading from the point of contact up to the back of his neck and down his legs. Steve leaves his hand there, and Bucky lets him.

\----

   
“I think I figured out what pencils means.” It’s been nearly two weeks, and Steve has been wracking his brain trying to come up with an answer, and it finally hit him, the night before at 2am.   
   
He sits down next to Bucky on the couch, a little closer than he would have a week ago, and Bucky doesn’t move away. They’ve made encouraging progress, since the incident with the bowl. Steve touches him a lot now, just casual, platonic, nonthreatening hand-pats to Bucky’s shoulders or bumps of their elbows while they’re standing next to each other doing the dishes or sitting on the couch close enough for their shoulders to touch while they watch a movie. Bucky’s taken to Netflix documentaries. He knows so little about so many things, and seems to like learning about them.  
   
Bucky at first showed no reaction to the touches, which was a win in Steve’s books because it was a far cry from recoiling away as if he thought Steve was going to strike him. Then he started initiating it himself. Now, 15 days into this experiment, Bucky seems to like it. Steve can calm him, when he gets frustrated over not being able to remember or when he gets that haunted look in his eyes that says he’s remembering too much. They other day he’d come out of the shower to find Bucky on the kitchen floor, lost again in a memory that tormented him, and Steve had crouched next to him and gently rubbed the back of his neck and brought Bucky back. He’s more at peace when Steve’s touching him. The hollow, haunted look in his eyes seems to fade a little, like it anchors him to good memories instead of bad. Steve still gets nauseous when he imagines the horrors Bucky must be remembering, but it’s nice to feel like he’s helping.  
   
“Oh?”  
   
“For my birthday, the year I turned 22. You saved up and bought me a really good set of charcoal pencils. All different weights.”  
   
Bucky frowns. “What are charcoal pencils?”  
   
“They’re for drawing. Like, for art. Drawing in black and white.”  
   
“You can draw?” Bucky asks, then almost immediately, his expression changes. “Oh. You can draw.”  
   
“You remember?”  
   
He nods. He rubs his mouth and stares with wide eyes down at the coffee table. He gets this stunned look on his face, whenever he remembers something good. Like he can’t believe it. “I took one. I stole a sketch you did of me, out of one of your books, and I took it with me when I shipped out.”  
   
Steve frowns. “You did?”  
   
“You didn’t notice?”  
   
“I did hundreds of sketches of you,” Steve confesses. He doesn’t elaborate on their exact nature, because Bucky doesn’t seem to remember that yet. Steve doesn’t know if he ever will. “I wouldn’t have noticed just one going missing.”  
   
Bucky gets up, suddenly, disappearing off toward his bedroom. Steve stares after him, and Bucky comes back out a few seconds later holding a green Post-it. He hands it to Steve – it’s the one that says  _Rebecca_.  
   
“Can you draw her? I don’t … I can’t remember her. I have her name in my head but I can’t picture her face.”  
   
“Yeah, of course. Let me just …” Steve goes to Tony’s desk, and finds a sheet of printer paper and a regular pencil. It’s almost a miracle that Tony has old fashioned office supplies here, given how committed he is to all his tech. Steve can’t remember ever seeing him physically write anything down. He leans over the desk, quickly sketching Becca’s face from memory. It comes with a sad realization as he does, that he’s sketching her as a skinny, freckled teenager, because neither of them ever came back from the war and never got to see her grow up. Steve had been an only child, and an orphan well before 1943. He didn’t leave anything important behind in Brooklyn. But Bucky did.  
   
He takes the sketch back to Bucky when he’s done and hands it over. Bucky sits back on the couch as he looks at it, equal parts curiosity and sadness in his eyes. He lightly traces his fingertips over the image of her face. Steve sits next to him, closer than maybe he should.  
   
“Does she look familiar?”  
   
“I think so. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, what’s real.”  
   
Steve nods. He supposes that’s to be expected, although he’s not sure any human in history has been as thoroughly brainwashed as Bucky was. There’s no playbook for this. Nothing is really to be expected, and at the same time, everything is.  
   
“Tell me again.”  
   
“Tell you what?”  
   
“That you’re not … like them.” Bucky takes a deep breath. “That I’m allowed to leave if I want to. That you don’t want to hurt me.”  
   
“I’m not  _going_ to hurt you,” Steve swears. “I don’t want to, but even if I did, I still wouldn’t. You’re safe with me. I’ll tell you every day, if it helps you believe it.”  
   
“I want to. I’m trying.”  
   
“I know.”  
   
“Sometimes I … I want to feel all this stuff, you know? I want to remember.” Bucky says it softly, clandestinely, like it’s the most brittle, valuable secret. “Then I do remember things, and I never want to feel anything ever again.”  
   
“I know,” Steve repeats, even though he doesn’t, even though he can’t begin to fathom it, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He loved that boy in Brooklyn, loved him so much it hurt. Now it hurts again, for different reasons.

\----

   
“Can I ask you something?” Bucky says, as they eat an early dinner on the front porch. With the sun still high in the sky, it’s a warm afternoon. The breeze has picked up, rustling through the trees, but it’s warm, too. Steve can see why Tony keeps this place. It’s peaceful. If they weren’t trespassing and running the risk every day of being found out and separated, Steve might want to stay here forever.  
   
“Sure.”  
   
Bucky puts his fork down, and when he looks up, Steve sees shades of  _him_ on his face. He doesn’t look like the soldier, the assassin, the brainwashed agent of Hydra, the broken man struggling to put the pieces of his shattered life together. He looks like Bucky. It fades as quickly as it came, but Steve swears he saw it. “What’s your plan, exactly? With me?”  
   
“I don’t really have one,” Steve admits. It isn’t the answer Bucky’s looking for, but he deserves honesty. “Stay here as long as we can. Keep helping you sort out your memories as they come back.”  
   
“What if at some point they stop coming back? And then that’s as good as it ever gets?”  
   
“Then that’s what we have. And that’s what we go forward with.”  
   
The answer doesn’t seem to satisfy him, but Bucky goes back to his pork chop and doesn’t ask anything else. Steve wishes he could be more reassuring. He wishes he  _had_ a plan. He wishes he had any idea what he’s doing. Their situation seems less treacherous than it did when they first arrived, but it could still go sideways at any moment, and Steve hates that he can’t promise Bucky it won’t. It’s only by dumb luck that they haven’t encountered disaster yet. Steve’s ability to handle anything else that might be coming is so profoundly inadequate.  _He_ is profoundly inadequate. He always has been, and he’s maybe never felt it more deeply than he does at this moment.

\----

   
Steve wipes the fog from the mirror after he gets dressed and takes in his reflection. He wants to shave, because the beard he’s grown in the last three weeks is scratchy on his face, but it’s a good disguise. He’s never had much in the way of facial hair before, so if he goes out in public in a hat and sunglasses with this added natural camouflage, he’s more or less unrecognizable.   
   
They’ve tested that theory, and it’s thus far been proven. They managed to go back to the grocery store when their supplies needed replenishing. They found a men’s clothing outlet and Steve bought them both a few more outfits that actually fit, so they don’t have to keep borrowing Tony’s clothes. He found Bucky a comfortable pair of gloves and some long sleeves so they can go out without worrying about his metal hand. He’d had a small moment of panic when they walked past a shop window with a shield in it that looked just like the one Steve dropped in the Potomac, until he realized it was a gag gift shop, and the shield was a replica. Bucky went inside before Steve could tell him not to, recognizing the shield as well. They’d found a vintage Bucky Bear, something Tony had told him they sold after the war. Bucky is fascinated with both, so Steve buys them, too. He’d hung the shield up on the wall in Bucky’s bedroom, and put the bear on top of the dresser next to a fake plant.  
   
The walls are covered in Post-its, now. Pink ones and yellow ones along with the green and orange, because Bucky keeps using them up and Steve keeps buying him more. Some of them are just a single word. Some of them are more detailed descriptions of events or places or memories. Steve has helped him make sense of them, when Bucky’s asked. He’s drawn more for him, as well. The fire escape outside their apartment, their kitchen, their street. The faces of the Howling Commandos. A young Peggy Carter. That one had been difficult, but Bucky had asked him to, so Steve did it. He’s also pinned those up in Bucky’s room, so all four walls are a patchwork of memories for him to absorb as he sits on his bed.  
   
Steve rubs at his beard, and puts a razor back in the drawer. It’d be stupid, to shave it off. It helps them stay undetected.   
   
There is sudden, unexpected scuffling and yelling beyond the door, and Steve looks up. He hears a gun cock, and a panicked male voice yelling, “whoa, easy! I’m not armed!”  
   
He recognizes that voice, and panics himself, because it isn’t Bucky. He runs out of the bathroom. Tony is pressed against the front door of the cabin, his hands raised in surrender, and Bucky has a gun on him. Tony sees Steve, and yells to him, “can you call off your dog please?”  
   
“Who are you?” Bucky shouts, shoving the gun closer to Tony’s forehead.  
   
“Bucky.” Steve hurries over and touches his waist. “Buck, let him go. He’s a friend.”  
   
Bucky doesn’t move a muscle. His whole body is a taught, immobile line – his training kicking back in, overriding all the progress they’ve made. His jaw is set and his eyes are intense, and the metal finger on the trigger is steady as a rock, ready to pull it at any second without a thought.  
   
Steve really, really doesn’t want to do this in front of Tony, but it’s the only thing that’s proven effective when Bucky gets like this. It’s happened, they’ve had setbacks, one during a thunderstorm and one when a strong wind had a tree branch knocking into the side of the house. Steve moves in a little closer, reaching out and brushing the backs of his knuckles over Bucky’s cheek.   
   
“It’s okay,” he says, a soft, reassuring murmur. “Bucky, he isn’t a threat. I promise, alright? You trust me, don’t you?”  
   
Bucky doesn’t answer but the frown twisting his forehead softens just a little.  
   
Steve puts his other hand on Bucky’s chest, his fingers still touching his cheek. “He’s my friend, he isn’t here to hurt us. You’re okay. You’re safe.”  
   
“What the hell, Rogers?” Tony demands.  
   
Bucky snarls and pushes the muzzle of the gun into Tony’s forehead, hard enough to turn the surrounding skin white. Tony’s indignant expression melts back into worried.  
   
“You really think now’s a good time to be running your mouth?” Steve snaps at him. He focuses back on Bucky. “Hey, look at me. Please?”  
   
It’s reluctant, but Bucky does. His eyes move to Steve’s, although they keep flicking back to Tony and Steve can’t hold his attention entirely.  
   
Steve rubs his thumb over Bucky’s cheekbone, and slowly moves his other hand down the metal arm. “I promised to keep you safe. You know I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you. It’s okay.”  
   
“I’m not letting him hurt  _you_ ,” Bucky says in a low voice.  
   
“He won’t.”   
   
When Steve’s hand gets to the gun, Bucky’s finger slips off the trigger. Steve manages to soothe him into compliance, and he moves Bucky away from Tony. Bucky turns to him, fear and confusion in his eyes, and Steve takes his face in his hands.  
   
“He won’t hurt us,” he repeats, whispering now. “Everything’s okay.”  
   
Bucky relaxes, but only slightly. His head turns to look back at Tony. “Who is he?”  
   
“A friend,” Steve says again, because he isn’t quite sure how else to explain it. Bucky doesn’t know about the Avengers. Not yet. Remembering Project Rebirth and Captain America had thrown him through enough of a loop, Steve wasn’t ready to lay the existence of other super-humans on him. He asks Tony, “how did you find us?”  
   
“Everyone thinks you’re dead,” Tony says, accusatory and not answering the question. His gaze moves to Bucky. “They think he killed you, and then disappeared back to whatever shelf Hydra keeps him on when he’s not assassinating innocent people.”  
   
Bucky lurches, and Steve has to grab him to hold him back.  
   
Tony smirks like it’s on the tip of his tongue to fire off a snappy retort, but then he remembers Bucky is still holding a gun, and thinks the better of it.  
   
“Can you give us a minute?” Steve asks Bucky.  
   
Bucky turns his frown to Steve. “No.”  
   
“Everything’s fine,” Steve says gently. “I just need to talk to him. Please?”  
   
Bucky’s jaw clenches like he’s squeezing his molars together. He glares at Tony. “You touch one hair on his head …” he threatens.  
   
Tony rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I got it.”  
   
“I will shoot you before you even hear me coming. You’ll be dead before you hit the ground,” Bucky growls, and then he does leave them, heading off to the bedrooms, the gun still clasped in his metal hand.  
   
“Well, he seems nice,” Tony mutters.  
   
“How did you find us?” Steve asks Tony, again.  
   
Tony points at the splintered wood and bent dead-bolt. “You broke my door.”  
   
“I’ll fix it.”  
   
Tony’s eyes find the mantle of the fireplace, where Steve had placed the dish Bucky had dropped and glued back together. “You broke my  _bowl_.”  
   
“Tony!”  
   
“They never found a body,” Tony states with a sigh, finally answering Steve’s question and turning to him with a hardened expression. “They found the shield my father made you, but not you. They’re probably still looking, but there’s only so far you could’ve gone with the current. I did the math. If you’d drowned, they should have found a body. So that had me thinking … he must not be dead. At first I thought you’d been taken. But then I realized Hydra’s not exactly known for being subtle, are they? If they’d captured Captain America, unlikely they wouldn’t be makin’ some noise about it. Using you to lure the rest of us into an ambush.”  
   
“Thanks for your concern,” Steve says, sarcastic.  
   
“You think I wasn’t concerned?” Tony asks darkly, and then Steve feels badly. Tony wanders to the kitchen as he continues, idly examining his surroundings like he’s looking for other things they’ve broken. “I figured, if you weren’t dead and Hydra didn’t have you, you must have left on your own. So I thought … where would he go? More or less everyone on the planet knows who you are, so, not that easy to disappear. I was stumped, for a good couple’a weeks. Then I remembered telling you about this place.”  
   
“You’re right. We had nowhere else to go.”  
   
“You know, for a moment, I really did think, no, Cap wouldn’t be there. Steve Rogers is a  _good man_.” Mocking drips off the words, and Tony’s smile is humorless. “Steve Rogers wouldn’t leave all his friends thinking he’s dead. Steve Rogers wouldn’t run off with an assassin, a man wanted in over twenty countries for international crimes, multiple direct violations of the Geneva Convention, dozens of cold-blooded kills under his belt. Steve Rogers wouldn’t betray the Avengers for the Winter Soldier. But here we are.”  
   
Steve’s stomach crawls, but he still burns to defend himself. “I’m guessing you’ve been filled in. So you know who he is. You know he didn’t do any of those things of his own free will.”  
   
“If they got him to The Hague he’d be sentenced to life in prison by Tuesday.”  
   
“It wasn’t him!” Steve insists.  
   
“Except it was. And I don’t think the UN has a ratified convention for Nazi brainwashing.”  
   
“Well they should!”  
   
“Maybe,” Tony concedes. “But they don’t.”  
   
“So, what does that mean, you think they should lock him up? For something he had no control over?”  
   
“Did I say that? Can I have a minute to process the fact that you’re actually here? With him? That you took off with him instead of asking for help?”  
   
“Hydra got to SHEILD, Tony. They were in the  _government_. People I’d been working beside, people I trusted with my life, were operatives all this time.”  
   
“I know that.” Tony fixes him with a strange look. He’s still annoyed, but there’s sympathy underneath it.  
   
“What was I supposed to do?”  
   
“I have a few suggestions! But I guess they’re pointless now, since it’s already done.” Tony leans back against the counter and crosses his arms over his chest. “You’re really in it, Cap. I don’t know how you’re gonna get out of this.”  
   
Steve swallows down the retort that bubbles up. The indignation at the insinuation he hasn’t already thought of that. He sits, too, at the small kitchen table, and leans over on his elbows. “He needed my help.”  
   
“What the fuck is with the petting?”  
   
“He didn’t know that touch could not cause pain. He didn’t  _know_ that, Tony. Think about what that means.”  
   
“Torture,” Tony surmises, a knowing grimace on his face.  
   
“They’ve had him since 1945, they’ve been torturing him for almost three-quarters of a century. It’s all he knows. When he sees hands coming toward him he thinks they’re going to hurt him, because he doesn’t know any different. I was trying to fix that, I … I started just touching his shoulders and his knee and stuff, trying to reintroduce him to it. And then he got kinda fixated on it. It calms him down, when … so I’m just going with it. I’ve never un-brainwashed anyone before, I’m doing my best.”  
   
“Are you screwing him?” Tony asks, point-blank. Blunt and devoid of nuance.  
   
“No,” Steve answers angrily.  
   
“I read about you two, you know. There were rumors. My dad knew about them.”  
   
Steve shoves that thought away, because it’s too uncomfortable to deal with at the moment, and it’s so long ago that there’s nothing to be done about it now. “Some days he still doesn’t even know who he is. No, I didn’t bring him here to be a hole for me to – ”  
   
“ _Were_  you? In the 40s, before Hydra got him?” Tony interrupts pointedly, not letting Steve complete his sentence, which is better anyway. He would have regretting saying what he was about to.  
   
The idea of admitting it sends anxiety fluttering in his chest for just a moment, and then he sets his jaw, daring Tony to have a problem with it. “That’s not the word I’d use to describe it.”  
   
Tony snorts. “Of course not. Your generation’s all about  _making love_.”  
   
Steve doesn’t respond. He owes Tony an explanation about a lot of things, but not that. He doesn’t owe anyone that.  
   
Tony regards him carefully, his eyes searching for answers in Steve’s face to questions he isn’t asking out loud. “So, your Nazi boyfriend suddenly came back to life after 70 years –”  
   
“He’s not a fucking Nazi,” Steve grinds out irritably. “Say that again and  _I’m_ gonna be the one to shoot you.”  
   
Tony gives him a look like he’d like to comment on Steve being over-dramatic, but he holds it back. “So, your  _brainwashed_  boyfriend suddenly came back from the dead, and your first instinct was to run off with him. After everything you know he’s done. After everything they did to him. Knowing he barely knew who you were. Knowing he could have killed you at any moment over the last three weeks.”  
   
“What did you want me to do?” Steve protests. “Just forget for a moment that my best friend is trapped somewhere in there. Even if that wasn’t the case … I mean what the hell else was I supposed to do with him? Hydra used him to kill dozens of people, I couldn’t just let him go.”  
   
“We contain him! We don’t invite him over for tea!”  
   
“I’m not letting you do that,” Steve says. He glares so Tony knows he means it. “You’ll have to go through me.”  
   
“Okay, relax, I didn’t mean tossing him in Guantanamo and throwing away the key. I meant we keep him somewhere safe until we could figure out what to do. For  _his_ safety as much as for everyone else’s. What the hell d’you think Hydra’s gonna do to him if they find you?” Tony shakes his head, and his annoyed look shifts just slightly into sadness. “Why didn’t you think you could come to me with this? Why didn’t you think I’d help you?”  
   
“I didn’t …” Steve shakes his head helplessly. He doesn’t know how to answer that, when he isn’t sure of anything anymore. He’d acted on instinct, hadn’t paused to think things through because there hadn’t been  _time_ to think things through. And then once he’d gotten Bucky safely away from the rest of the world, he didn’t want to risk letting anyone else back in. “I didn’t know who I could trust. SHIELD had been compromised, and Fury was lying to us … it wasn’t about you, Tony. It wasn’t about anyone. This was just too important. I couldn’t risk it.”  
   
“We’re supposed to be a team, Cap,” Tony says heavily. “That’s supposed to mean something. You and I don’t always see eye-to-eye on absolutely everything but I have your back when it matters. I thought you knew that.”  
   
“I do know that.” Steve rubs his hands over his face. He’s lost for what else to say.  
   
“You know he’s listening?” Tony asks, raising an eyebrow and glancing back toward the hall.  
   
Steve turns. Bucky is nowhere to be seen but he’s sure Tony is right. “You can come back out, Buck.”  
   
Gun still in his hand, Bucky appears slowly at the mouth of the hallway. Steve has trouble reading his face. He still looks angry, but now he looks nervous as well. “He really isn’t from Hydra?”  
   
Steve shakes his head. “You never have to go back to them.”  
   
“So, he’s from your people,” Bucky concludes. “He’s here to take  _you_  back.”  
   
Steve’s chest clenches uncomfortably at the thought of Bucky worrying Tony’s appearance means Steve is going to leave and he’ll be alone. “God. No.”  
   
Bucky looks at him from under a deep frown.  
   
“Can you put the gun away please?” Steve requests, his voice cracking.   
   
Bucky puts the safety on and tucks it into the back of his pants. His eyes shine. He looks outright scared, but for the first time, not scared of Steve. Scared to  _lose_ Steve. Scared he’s going to be left all alone, with a half-healed brain and only basic knowledge of how the world works in the future and little hope of surviving on his own.  
   
“If you want us to leave your cabin, we will,” Steve says to Tony. “But I’m not leaving him. I’m not going back with you, and I’m not letting you take him.”  
   
“I’m not here to take him anywhere,” Tony replies, and Steve believes him. “Barnes.”  
   
Bucky looks up, and Tony speaks to him.  
   
“I’m not here to take you anywhere,” Tony repeats. “And I’m not here to take Steve either.”  
   
“What do you want?” Bucky asks bluntly.  
   
Tony considers it for a moment, as if trying to figure out how to explain something complicated to a child. “Steve is my friend. I just wanted to make sure he’s okay.”  
   
Bucky’s expression doesn’t change, so Steve can’t tell if he bought Tony’s explanation. He turns back to Steve, and Steve wants to go to him and wrap him up in a tight hug to physically emphasize that he isn’t leaving. He stays where he is.  
   
“You gotta tell Wilson and Romanov you’re alive,” Tony says.  
   
Steve shakes his head. “It isn’t safe. If Hydra knows people know where he is, they’ll get to us through them.”  
   
“You think they’d talk?”  
   
Bucky answers, emotionlessly. “Hydra taught me how to make people talk.”  
   
The thought sends a cold rush through Steve’s veins.  
   
Tony shrugs. “All I know, is I’ve never seen two grown adults as blubbery as the two of them since you’ve been gone. They’re your friends, Cap. They love you, and they think you’re dead. Everyone does. Thor, Barton, all of them. They’d probably appreciate knowing aren’t.”  
   
He should have been expecting it. He’s such an idiot, of course they’re upset. Of course they think he’s dead. He just left, he’d been so focused on Bucky that he hadn’t even thought of anything else. He hadn’t considered the fallout for anyone else. Steve rubs his face again, leaving it resting in his hands for a moment as the cold dread of reality washes over him.

\----

   
Steve’s friend stays for a couple of hours. Bucky doesn’t say much else; doesn’t speak at all unless directly asked. He listens to their conversations, but doesn’t understand so many of the words that it’s hard to follow. Something about a tower, and avenging, and the possibility of extradition. When the man leaves, he hugs Steve briefly, and Bucky feels his automatic defenses flare up again at the sight of them touching. He doesn’t like people touching Steve. Doesn’t like that it leaves him vulnerable to attack.  
   
Steve doesn’t look the same, once he’s gone. Bucky doesn’t understand the emotions he can see on Steve’s face, but he notices them. Notices his eyes, and his downturned mouth, and the slouch of his shoulder as he stares into space in the kitchen. Before Bucky can ask, Steve leaves the room, heading down the hall. Bucky follows, from a distance. Listens, outside the half-open door, as Steve talks to a disembodied voice on the computer.  
   
“I’m so selfish, and stupid, and I’m just … I’m sorry,” Steve’s voice is saying. “I don’t know what else to say. You dropped everything to help me, when Nat and I showed up on your doorstep. And I just took off and I didn’t even think about you.”  
   
A male voice shakes as it answers, “Steve, we thought …”  
   
“I know. I should’ve told you sooner. I didn’t … I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t thinking about  _you_. Just caught up in my own shit, caught up in needing to save him. I’m so sorry.”  
   
It burns in Bucky’s chest. To know Steve is troubled, to know maybe Steve regrets what he did. To know the sacrifices he made to help Bucky when he needed it. He’s known all along he wasn’t worth it.  
   
When the other voice disappears, he nudges the door open and goes into Steve’s room. Steve is hunched over the desk, head back in his hands, sniffing quietly. “You can go back,” Bucky says to him. “I’ll be okay.”  
   
Steve looks up, eyes red and watering. He shakes his head. “This isn’t your fault.”  
   
“I’m the reason,” Bucky argues. “The reason your friends are mad. The reason you’re upset.”  
   
“No, you aren’t.” Steve sniffs again and wipes his nose with the heel of his hand. “I really don’t know how to explain it, just please believe me. It’s not your fault.”  
   
He turns back in the swivel chair, to stare at the blank computer screen. Bucky can see his sad reflection in it. He goes over, leaning down and wrapping his arms around Steve’s big shoulders from behind. It feels so familiar. Steve inhales like he’s surprised, and then he reaches one hand back to tangle in Bucky’s hair. Bucky buries his face in Steve’s neck, breathing him in. He’s done it all before. He’s held this body, he’s been touched by him, he’s breathed in this scent, clean and masculine. It’s brand new to this moment but it’s old as time.

\----


	4. Break

Steve makes the next grocery run on his own. He feels okay leaving Bucky for an hour, knowing he’s stable enough now that he’ll be safe from himself. Tony had traded cars with Steve, leaving Steve his Audi and taking the car Steve had stolen, to be disposed of. Tony’s car is flashier and does risk attracting unwanted attention, but it hasn’t been reported stolen so it’s less likely Steve will be pulled over. Neither are ideal but this is the safer of the two options. He fills the trunk with grocery bags, and a few things he bought specially for Bucky. When he gets back to the cabin, Bucky is on the front lawn. He’s lying down, this time, with his feet on the ground and his knees in the air. There are four chipmunks surrounding him, one sitting right on his chest. It makes Steve smile.  
   
He takes the broken bowl down from the mantle over the fireplace and takes it to the kitchen. He lines the bottom with a cloth napkin, and fills it with the sunflower seeds he’d found in the pet section of the store. Bucky sits up as Steve approaches and the chipmunks scatter.  
   
“Sorry for scaring your friends,” Steve says, as he sits on the grass next to him.  
   
“They’ll be back.”  
   
“I brought you something for them.” Steve hands him the bowl.  
   
“They’ll eat these?”  
   
“The bag says so.”  
   
Bucky scoops out a small handful and lays them on the ground in front of his crossed legs. Steve mirrors his position, and they wait. It’s only a minute before a brave one ventures back, skittishly examining the seeds and picking one up in tiny claws to nibble at it. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Bucky smile.  
   
“Tell your pals,” Bucky says to the animal.  
   
He offers the bowl to Steve, and Steve takes a handful. He follows suit as Bucky fills his metal palm with them and lays it on the ground. Another minute later, a second chipmunk runs over and eats from Bucky’s hand. A third one does the same with Steve.  
   
“They’re so little,” Bucky says, lifting his up so they can look closer as it fills its cheeks with seeds until they’re comically puffed out. “I could hurt them. But they trust that I won’t.”  
   
Steve licks his lips and swallows over the lump of emotion in his throat. After Bucky puts the chipmunk down and it runs off to stash the seeds, Steve moves in a little closer and puts his hand on Bucky’s knee. Bucky picks it up with his metal one, threading their fingers together. It’s cold against Steve’s skin.  
   
“Can you feel it?” Steve asks.  
   
Bucky shakes his head.  
   
“What do you know about it?”  
   
“Not much.” The gears buzz quietly as Bucky moves the fingers, tightening them around Steve’s. “I have a blurry memory of waking up with it.”  
   
“That’s not on the wall.”  
   
Bucky doesn’t answer, and Steve gently presses the issue.  
   
“Are there other things you remember? That aren’t up there?”  
   
“There’s a lot of things I don’t want to remember.”  
   
“I know.”  
   
“I don’t remember everyone I killed. But I remember some of them. Their faces. Their voices, begging. I never even thought twice. Their pleas were nothing.”  
   
“It wasn’t you,” Steve says softly. “You didn’t have a choice.”  
   
“I still did it. I still see their faces when I close my eyes. I can still hear them screaming. I have to live with that, Steve. You can’t fix it.”  
   
Two chipmunks come back, and the smaller one climbs right into the bowl.  
   
“I know,” Steve repeats. There’s nothing more he can say. Bucky's right. He can’t erase it, he can’t ease Bucky’s suffering with words. He might never be able to. He takes a chance and puts his arm around Bucky, steeling himself for the blow-back that never comes. “Is this okay?” he asks, anyway, because Bucky deserves choice. Hydra never gave him choices. They never let him want anything. They just told, and acted, and ordered. Bucky deserves to say no, and to be listened to if he does.  
   
But he doesn’t say no. He nods, and leans in just a little more. 

\----

   
Bucky spreads shaving gel over his cheeks, still warm from the shower. It starts out clear and blue and then lathers into a rich white foam under his fingertips. He picks up the red razor Steve had bought for him and holds it in his hand, mind unhelpfully flashing to memories of being shaved other places in preparation for experiments.  
   
“Buck?” Steve knocks, and laughs a little. “Sorry, I gotta pee really badly, do you mind?”  
   
Bucky puts the razor back onto the counter and opens the door. The sight of Steve’s face falling confuses him, until he remembers he’s shirtless. Steve hasn’t seen that, yet. He’s been so different, to what Bucky’s used to. He’s given Bucky space, and privacy, and agency. He hasn’t demanded things, he hasn’t taken from Bucky things he isn’t willingly offering. But that means he hasn’t seen, until now, Bucky’s shoulder. The angry red skin, the long raised scars, the place where knives dug into him and metal was fused with flesh.  
   
Bucky steps around him, gesturing for Steve to use the bathroom while he waits in the hall. Steve does, and when the toilet flushes and the water runs, Bucky swallows and steels himself for a conversation he’s not sure he’s ready for. It’s one thing to remember. It’s another to admit it. Steve’s face is still sad when the door reopens. Bucky tries to smile, as they trade places, him back in front of the mirror and Steve in the hall.  
   
“You know, they …” he begins, but then trails off when he thinks Steve is gone.  
   
He isn’t. He’s back in a second, standing behind Bucky in the doorway, his reflection in the mirror.  
   
Bucky breathes. He holds the razor again, in his metal hand so he can’t feel it. He looks down at it, tells it, “they used to do this for me. Didn’t let me do much on my own. Guess they were worried I’d kill myself or something, if I wasn’t supervised.”  
   
Steve stays quiet.  
   
“The first night we were here … that was the first time I was allowed to shower alone, in … I don’t know how long. I thought it might be a trap.”  
   
“Do you trust me, now?”  
   
Bucky nods, making eye contact in the mirror. And he does. It isn’t as consistent as he’d like. He still has moments. But for the most part, he does.  
   
“Do you want me to?” Steve asks in a soft voice.  
   
Exhaling, Bucky closes his eyes momentarily. It hadn’t been what he was aiming for. But Steve saying it has his shoulders relaxing, his guard slipping a little. The idea of it, of being helped, but by someone who cares about him this time, makes him feel peaceful. At the same time it makes him hate himself. He shouldn’t want it. After everything, he should want to insist on independence. He shouldn’t long for being handled.  
   
“It’s okay, if you need it,” Steve says, still soft, coming further into the room. “It doesn’t mean … anything. It doesn’t mean you liked what they did to you.”  
   
Bucky worries it means exactly that, but he still holds the razor out. He can’t resist.  
   
“Sit up here.” Steve pats the counter, and Bucky does, made lighter by the return of obedience. There’s weight, in making choices. He doesn’t dislike it all the time. Right now, it feels good to follow the order.  
   
Steve works so much more gently than they ever did. He runs the razor under warm water and drags it over Bucky’s jawline, carefully scraping it along his skin and rinsing it often. Bucky feels himself sliding almost to another plane of existence. He feels like he’s floating. When Steve is finished, he soaks a washcloth in warm water and wipes away the leftover foam from Bucky’s cheeks, moving the soft, warm cloth over his newly smooth skin. Bucky makes a noise, a quiet whimper, fully beyond his control.  
   
He doesn’t want Steve to move away, or to stop touching. His touch is grounding, freeing. It makes Bucky feel safe, and taken care of. It makes Bucky believe this man would tear the world down to protect him.  
   
Steve’s hand hovers over Bucky’s shoulder, uncertainty shining in his eyes. Like the summer sky, like the ocean, their blue is endless. “Can I?”  
   
Bucky nods.  
   
Steve’s fingers explore, walking along long scars, brushing over twists of hardened flesh. There’s heartbreak on his face, and moisture in his eyes.  
   
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Bucky tells him, hoping that will somehow be comforting.  
   
“That’s good,” Steve answers, eyes still trained on Bucky’s shoulder.  
   
“It’s pretty ugly, huh?” Bucky tries to joke, tries to loosen the clench in his chest.  
   
Steve shakes his head, and meets his eyes. “You’re not ugly. The things they did to you are ugly. But you’re not.”  
   
Bucky wants to be wrapped up by him, to be made whole again in his hands. He suspects it isn’t a new emotion. He reaches out with his flesh hand, finds Steve’s ribcage and curls his fingers around it. Steve gets the message, moving in carefully for a hug that Bucky accepts with sunshine gleaming in his veins. He squeezes both arms around a body he knows he’s hugged so many times, but a lifetime ago, back when they were different people. He’s held this body against his when it was small and angry, shaking with injustice, when it was warm and soft on cold winter nights, when it was suddenly big and they were in the woods in France and Steve was so lost, drowning in the pressure that came with the world suddenly on his shoulders. They were big shoulders, after the serum, but not big enough to lift that burden all on his own. Bucky had helped him carry it, like Steve’s doing now for him.  
   
“They hurt me,” Bucky says.  
   
“I know,” Steve answers. His beard is soft against Bucky’s cheek.  
   
“I know you wouldn’t. I trust you.”  
   
Steve nods. “I’m happy to hear it. We needed a silver lining.”  
   
“What’s a silver lining?”  
   
“One good thing, in a bad situation.”  
   
“Oh.” Bucky manages a smile. “Yeah. That’s what you are.”

\----

   
“Why did we call him Dum Dum?” Bucky asks. He’s on the floor in his bedroom, at the foot of the bed, staring up at his wall of memories. At face-level is the sketch Steve had done of their unit from the war.  
   
Steve chuckles. “I don’t know, actually. You guys called him that before I got there. I never asked.” He’s on the bed, reclined against the headboard, a sketch pad he’d bought propped up on his knees. He’s shirtless because it’s a warm day, and Bucky is too. He’s less self-conscious about his arm and his scars, since the other day in the bathroom.  
   
Steve is sketching Bucky. Not the Bucky from Brooklyn like he’d done before so Bucky could see what he used to look like, but this Bucky. The one he has right now. Sitting out on the lawn, surrounded by massive trees and tiny chipmunks. Still shadowed by nightmares and horrific memories, but healing. Morning sun streams in through the big window, warm and bright. Bucky’s spent a lot of time in this room since Steve came up with the Post-it note idea, and now Steve usually spends it with him. Helping him make sense of the things he remembers, and sketching the things he can’t.  
   
Bucky tips his head back onto the mattress so he can look at Steve upside down. “What are you drawing?”  
   
“You.”  
   
Bucky gets up and comes over to see. It’s not quite finished, but Steve shows him. He’d put a chipmunk on the top of Bucky’s head, and a smile on his face. It’s replicated in real time, as Bucky’s mouth curves.  
   
“I like this one.”  
   
“You don’t like all of them?” Steve teases, and it earns him a quiet laugh.  
   
“I like all of them,” Bucky confirms.  
   
He hands the notebook back to Steve, and sits beside him on the bed. Steve puts it to the side. He can finish later. He lifts his arm, offering Bucky a spot against his chest, and Bucky takes it, laying against him with his head on Steve’s shoulder so he can still see the wall, dotted in all his multicolored memories. He’s been writing more of the bad ones down too, since they talked about it. From his vantage point, Steve can see the pink note that says  _lightening chair_. He hasn’t asked about that one. Thoughts of what it might mean make his stomach hurt.

  
 

“We were in love, weren’t we?” Bucky asks.  
   
Steve’s not sure, for a moment, he heard correctly. Then his heart stops. “You … remember that?”  
   
“Not everything. Not specific details, I just … I remember loving you, in a way that doesn’t feel like we were only friends.”  
   
Steve licks his lips, his chest swelling and constricting all at once. He didn’t know when or if that particular bit of their history would come up. Bucky might never have remembered. His voice is tight with emotion as he says, “there was a whole lot stacked against us. We didn’t get as much time together as we should have.”  
   
“You were small. Fragile.”  
   
“Yeah.” Steve smiles. “I would’ve punched you in the nose for saying that back then. But you’re right. I was.”  
   
“I think I loved you a lot,” Bucky says softly, almost more to himself than to Steve. Like saying it out loud helps him remember it more viscerally. Steve hardly dares to believe it, and tries desperately to keep himself from bursting into tears. “Did I love you as much once you were bigger?”  
   
“I think so. I hope so, anyway. I wasn’t very nice about it.”  
   
“About what?”  
   
“All my life I’d been so invisible, to everyone but Mom and you. I just wanted to be seen. Everybody saw you. Everywhere we went, guys wanted to be your friend, shop owners wanted to hire you, girls wanted you to kiss them and take them dancing. I was so jealous of you. You got everything I always wanted, and you didn’t even do anything for it. It just fell in your lap.”  
   
“I’m sorry.”  
   
“No.” Steve shakes his head, and brushes the backs of his knuckles over Bucky’s cheek. “No, Buck, it wasn’t your fault.  _You_ saw me. You believed in me and looked after me and stuck by me when you didn’t have to. You saw what I was worth because you bothered to look past the surface. No one else ever did. A lot of people still don’t. And after the serum … suddenly I was tall and strong and other people were paying attention to me for the first time and I … I think I forgot, at first, that you were the one who’d been there all along. But I didn’t forget for long.”  
   
“You loved me back?”  
   
“God, Bucky.” Steve shifts in a little closer, getting sappy about it because Bucky deserves that. He deserves to be told how valuable he is. Hydra took that from him; stripped him down to just a body they could control. Steve has to put it back. He rubs along Bucky’s cheek with the pad of his thumb. “There aren’t enough words in existence to explain how much I loved you. You were my entire world. I loved you with every cell in my whole body, since before I can even remember. Since the beginning of time. Since we were stardust.”  
   
Bucky’s eyebrows furrow, and Steve explains.  
   
“The matter that makes up humans. It’s from exploded stars. They figured that out, since the war. It made me think … maybe you and I were from the same star. Maybe we were always destined to find each other.”  
   
Bucky nods and presses his lips together. “What about now?”  
   
“I never stopped loving you. Not for one minute.”  
   
“What do we do?”  
   
Steve frowns. “About what?”  
   
“Everything.” Bucky’s eyes close and he turns his face into Steve’s neck. “We can’t stay here forever. At some point you have to go back to your life.”  
   
“Not without you.”  
   
“Steve, you have to.” Peeking up at him through his lashes, Bucky looks incredibly sad. “The world needs you, your friends need you. You might not be able to take me with you. The things I did …”  
   
“They weren’t your fault.”  
   
“It might not matter. Your friend was right.”  
   
Steve thinks back to his conversation with Tony that Bucky was listening in on, and remembers what Tony said that Bucky’s referencing. That he still killed people, even if he was forced to do it, and that international law might not be as forgiving as Steve is.  
   
“We’ll figure it out,” he promises. “Look at me.”  
   
Bucky does.  
   
“I swear to you that I’m not letting you go, not ever again. Whatever we have to do to get this sorted out, we’ll do it.” Emotion rises painfully in his throat as he adds, “I let go of your hand once. I’m not doing it again.”  
   
“I remember that, now.” Bucky reaches with his flesh hand up to his own face to take Steve’s, threading their fingers together. “The train. And the snow. You didn’t let go. You tried.”  
   
“I’ll succeed this time,” Steve vows. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, he’ll never stop blaming himself for not being able to catch Bucky before he fell. Everything he’s been through since all comes down to that moment. If Steve had caught him, none of the rest of it would have happened. Bucky might have survived the war, he could have gone back to New York even if Steve didn’t. Could’ve met someone else, settled down, had a house and a dog and a bunch of blue-eyed troublemaking kids. He deserved that.  
   
“Stardust,” Bucky says, in a dreamy voice, looking down at their hands. “I like that.”  
   
“Me too.”  
   
“I remembered you. They tried to erase you, but they couldn’t. Not if we’re made of the same stuff.”  
   
Steve nods, and tears burn his eyes.  
   
“Do you wanna kiss me?” Bucky asks, blinking up at Steve.  
   
Steve wants it so much, has burned for it since the second he saw Bucky on that bridge, but would die before pushing it on him. “Only if it’s what you want.”  
   
Bucky blinks again, eyes liquid like Steve’s are.  
   
“I mean it.” Steve squeezes his hand. “For 70 years you didn’t get to want anything. That’s over, now. We only do the things you really want. Not the things you think you have to do because it’s what I want.”  
   
“Kiss me,” Bucky says. It’s a request.  
   
Steve leans forward and does, pressing his lips softly into Bucky’s. It’s slow, and innocent, and he still tastes like summer and warmth and home, like he always did. His lips are a revelation, a firework in slow motion, Steve’s redemption solid and real in front of him. A 70-year-old spark, reignited. In the impossible future they used to promise each other would exist one day. Steve in 1939 wouldn’t have believed this, if he could somehow go back in time and tell him it’s coming. Steve in 2014 barely believes it either.  
   
“Stardust,” Bucky whispers again, against Steve’s mouth.

\----

   
They watch another cartoon movie, this one about a bunch of toys that come to life and get separated from the child that owns them. Steve sniffles a little throughout, always so tender-hearted. Bucky allows himself to be curled in Steve’s lap, to be held, to be cradled against his broad chest. It feels like the safest space he’s ever occupied. Like even if Hydra’s top agents burst into the house right now, they couldn’t get to him as long as he’s in Steve’s arms. He reaches up to wipe tears from Steve’s cheeks, and smiles as Steve kisses him wetly. For a while, they forget the movie. It carries on without them in the background, while Steve kisses him and whispers to him promises about keeping him safe, and loving him across the whole universe. They make Bucky’s skin prickle. They make him remember warm nights when he’d promise those things, because Steve was the one, back then, who didn’t think he was worthy of it.  
   
“I didn’t eat, once, for almost four days,” Bucky says. He doesn’t know where the memory comes from. It just floats into his head from nowhere, like most of them do.  
   
Steve lifts his head from where his chin had been resting on the top of Bucky’s, so he can look down at him. “When?”  
   
“I don’t know. I remember you were sick. The scary kind of sick, not just a cough. You’d be in bed, wrapped up in every blanket we had and you’d still be cold. Maybe … maybe you needed medicine, maybe we couldn’t afford food for a while.”  
   
Steve licks his lips. He closes his eyes for a moment and then rests his face back against Bucky’s hair. “That could be one of about a dozen memories. That happened a lot. I always tried to insist I’d eat less too, that we’d share whatever we had left in the icebox until your next paycheck. But you’d refuse. Or you’d lie to me, tell me you were eating while I was napping, but go hungry anyway behind my back. Used to make me so mad.”  
   
Bucky trails his fingers over the front of Steve’s t-shirt. A silent apology. “We didn’t have enough. Couldn’t let you starve, not when you needed your strength to get better.”  
   
“You did a lot of sacrificing for me.” Steve sounds unhappy about it.  
   
“You did, too,” Bucky argues gently. “We both did. Had to make ends meet somehow.”  
   
“I guess so,” Steve admits.  
   
“It sucked. Being poor.”  
   
“Everyone we knew was poor. But maybe we were rich in other ways.”  
   
“Like what?”  
   
Steve brushes his thumb underneath Bucky’s left eye, the long fringe of his lower lashes kissing the top of it. “I had you.”  
   
Bucky looks down. It’s too much. Steve’s eyes are too blue, too filled with sincerity and affection. After everything he’s done, Bucky doesn’t feel like he deserves any of it. But he wants it, oh God does he want it. Wants to feel loved again.  
   
“I mean it. I know that sounds like some flowery shit, but I’m serious. I had a best pal who looked out for me and stood up for me and was happy to get in a girl’s bad books if she said something rude about me. You looked after me, when I was sick. You had my back in all those dumb fights I used to start.”  
   
“I bet you still do that,” Bucky says quietly, and Steve smiles.  
   
“Yeah, I do. And they haven’t always turned out so well without you there to back me up.”  
   
“Bet you’ve got a whole army of people now, who’d like to back you up, and you fight ‘em every step of the way like you did with me.”  
   
Steve’s turn to smile. “See how well you know me?”  
   
“I know you’re a thorn in everybody’s side, Rogers. Always have been.” Bucky blinks up at him. He turns his face into Steve’s hand, nuzzling his nose into it. “Always do it for the right reasons, though. Always protecting people who aren’t as strong as you.”  
   
Steve doesn’t answer in words, but the way his gaze flickers down and his lips curve into a soft smile answers for him.  
   
Bucky inches in closer so he can kiss the corner of Steve’s mouth, and Steve leans into it to capture Bucky’s lips. “I was never as strong as you,” Bucky whispers, counting himself as one of those weaker people Steve was always protecting.  
   
“Buck.”  
   
“It’s true and you know it.” Bucky laughs about it a little, remembering. It isn’t a bad memory. He never minded, knowing that Steve was bigger than he was in the ways that counted. He only minded that no one else saw it. He minded that Steve’s fearlessness and ferocity were overlooked because he was small. He had more courage in his smallest toe than bigger men had in their whole bodies. “Maybe my body was stronger, and healthier, before the war, but inside I was way more breakable than you were. Nowhere near as brave. And so fuckin’ gone for you.”  
   
Steve repeats his name.  
   
“That was part of it, y’know?” Bucky’s mind is inundated with another flash of memories. “I came with conditions. Whether or not you were there with me meant everything. I remember everyone thinkin’ I was in charge when we were together, just ‘cause I was taller, but it was always you. They thought you were following me around and I was letting you until I got bored. But they were wrong. I was always the one following you around. Hoping you’d keep on lookin’ my way. I remember feeling like I would’ve died if you didn’t love me back.”  
   
“Good thing I did, then.” Steve’s eyes aren’t dry, again, and it isn’t because of the movie this time. He wasn’t this touchy, before. Bucky was the sensitive one. Steve was always too afraid it would confirm people’s biases about him if he ever showed too much emotion. He was afraid they’d think he was soft, and he was right, to worry they’d think it. They would have. He let those walls down with Bucky, when they were alone and safe from the judging outside world, but even then he was guarded.  
   
It’s a painful pill to swallow, wondering about the things Steve might have been through since they’ve been separated, so that now, instead of griping about it on principle and loving it in secret, it wets his eyes to hear Bucky talk about love.  
   
Steve leads him down the hallway towards the bedrooms by the hand, once the movie ends. At Bucky’s door, Steve kisses his cheek and tells him to sleep well, and then lets him go and keeps walking. Watching him move away feels just for a second like watching him leave forever. It shouldn’t. Bucky knows Steve is going to sleep in his own bed, like he has every night for a month. He knows in the morning Steve will emerge with messy hair and sleepy eyes and pillow creases on his cheeks and they’ll eat breakfast together on the front porch.  
   
As if he can sense something is wrong, Steve turns and frowns. Bucky shakes his head and looks at the ground. He’s not thinking clearly. He’s not sure he’s been thinking clearly since the moment he saw Steve on that bridge. Since Steve said his name, since Bucky recognized that voice, from somewhere buried deep in his subconscious.  
   
“Ask me,” Steve says.  
   
Bucky shakes his head again. He can’t.  
   
Steve moves back in closer. He slides his arms around Bucky’s waist and leans in so their foreheads are together. Bucky drags his fingers through the beard Steve has grown as a disguise.  
   
“Whatever it is, you can have it,” Steve promises. “You just gotta ask.”  
   
“You’ve always been like this.”  
   
“Like what?”  
   
“Always giving up pieces of yourself for other people. How long until there’s nothing left?”  
   
Steve shakes his head. His nose bumps Bucky’s. “It’s not like that when it’s you. Do you have any idea how much I missed you? The last three years, I … when I went into the ice, I thought that was it. I thought I was ending it. I thought … you were gone, and my folks were gone, what the hell did I have waiting for me back home? Thought my life could mean something, if giving it up could save thousands of people. I didn’t want to wake up decades in the future and have to live in a world without you in it. I would’ve given away every single thing I had to get you back.”  
   
“I’ve been sleeping on the floor,” Bucky confesses.  
   
“Oh,” Steve says after a pause. His exhale slides over Bucky’s cheek. He’s pressed against him all the way down, and Steve is so warm, and big, and his presence is comforting. “I thought … you were just really disciplined about making the bed.”  
   
Bucky swallows thickly and pushes his fingers into Steve’s hair. “I never had a bed. Not since ours. In Brooklyn.”  
   
“Tell me what you want,” Steve urges. “I promise I want it too. I just need you to say it first. So it doesn’t feel like I’m forcing things on you, like they did.”  
   
“Share with me?” Bucky manages.  
   
Steve nods, and kisses him. He pushes the door open behind Bucky, and pulls him into the bedroom, shutting the door behind them so they’re locked away from the world outside. He wraps them in soft blankets. Bucky had lost concepts, when he was with Hydra. He rarely felt truly unsafe, because he didn’t have context for the alternative. It was just reality. These days, cocooned with Steve in warmth and softness and someone who loved him for an entire lifetime, he remembers what safe feels like.  
   
“Tell me about us,” he requests. He keeps trailing fingertips over the dark blond hairs on Steve’s face.  
  
“What do you wanna know?”  
  
“How long were we like this?”  
  
Steve thinks about it. He hooks a leg over Bucky’s knees, keeping them connected all the way down. He’d been a little worried, at first, about holding Bucky like this. Didn’t want Bucky to feel trapped. But he seems to like it. He _trusts_ Steve, and Steve understands how significant that is. “About six years. I guess eight, if you count the war. Although it was more complicated in those years.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“You remember … that we weren’t supposed to, right? That we had to hide?”  
  
“Oh.” Bucky frowns. He hadn’t, but he does now that Steve says it. He remembers funny looks they’d get, he remembers whispers, he remembers having to take pretty dates out now and then to keep up appearances. He remembers knowing what would happen to them if they were found out. He remembers his mother warning him what people might think, if he didn’t find a nice girl and settle down. “What about now?”  
  
“It’s different everywhere. Some countries in Africa they’ll kill you for it. Because Christian missionaries went over in the 60s and fucked everything up.”  
  
“Here?”  
  
“We wouldn’t be arrested. If we walked down the street holding hands, we probably wouldn’t be attacked.”  
  
“Only probably?”  
  
“Only probably,” Steve confirms sadly. “Some people wouldn’t mind. Some would. In other countries we could get married, if we wanted. But not here.”  
  
“Everything’s so different, but at the same time it isn’t.”  
  
“I know. Took me a while to get my head around it.” Steve turns his face into Bucky’s palm, kissing the heel of it. “What do you remember?”  
  
“Just flashes. Little fragments of memories.” He’s frustrated by it. Other things, he remembers so clearly. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. The things he wants to remember the most seem to be the furthest out of reach. “I don’t know why.”  
   
“Maybe you locked it up extra tight. So they couldn’t take it from you.”  
   
Through his frustration, Bucky does like that idea. He likes the idea that he was fighting back, all along, even if it was buried so deep inside the programming that he couldn’t access it. “I remember loving you so much. Even though you were stubborn and always fighting me on everything and getting yourself into trouble. You had such a big lion heart. And a ribcage too small for it.”  
  
“Sounds like I was a pain in the ass.”  
  
“Only if we didn’t use enough Vaseline.”  
  
Steve stares at him in the darkness and then his face cracks into a smile. “Was that a joke?”  
  
“It was an attempt.”  
  
Steve laughs loudly, joy lighting up his features. He pushes, getting Bucky on his back and draping half over him, head on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky tucks arms around him, one his own and one forced on him, squeezing them tight.  
  
“You’re an idiot,” Steve says fondly. In his voice it sounds like poetry. “Always were.”  
  
Bucky keeps him close and strokes his hair and whispers other pieces of memories to him. Nice ones, ones soaked in sunshine and laughter. For the first time since they’ve been here, Bucky sleeps so soundly he doesn’t dream.

\----

   
Sunlight wakes him, laying in lines over his face from the top of the window where the curtains don’t quite cover it. Bucky blinks the sleep out of his eyes, lying still for a moment or two. When he turns his head Steve is facing away from him, blond hair splayed on the pillow, blankets tucked around his shoulders. They move, just slightly, as he breathes. Bucky wants to touch him. Wants to roll over and curl around him from behind. He almost does. Then a memory floats to the surface, sudden and beyond his control.  
   
He remembers a man with yellow hair and blue eyes, coming into the cell where they kept him, wearing a military uniform. Talking to him softly,  _it’s me, Buck, it’s Steve, I’m here_. Bucky always believed him. Always collapsed against him in relief, Steve was there, Steve had found him again like he did the first time Hydra took him. Steve would help, Steve would save him. That Steve was always gentle, and kind, until suddenly he wasn’t. Until he’d tell Bucky he wasn’t going to save him, because Bucky wasn’t worth saving. That he was worthless, that Steve had never cared about him, that he’d always just gotten in the way of the happiness Steve truly deserved.   
   
Steve would shove him to the floor, take him like he used to in their bed in Brooklyn but without any of the softness, only anger and wounding words and searing pain, and then leave him there. Leave him broken and used, with men in lab coats who’d darkly taunt him.  _You see? He never loved you at all._  
   
Bucky’s heartrate increases. His stomach churns, and his skin crawls, and he brings a hand up to press against his mouth to stifle a scream. It isn’t Steve. Steve’s dead, or else he’s an old man somewhere far away from here, with no idea Bucky’s still alive. The body next to him is someone else.  
   
He sits up. His head is spinning and his heart is thundering in his chest but he tries desperately to extract himself from the bed without making noise. He moves quickly from the room, mind racing from thought to thought and struggling to remember his training. To remember what they taught him, how to escape if he was ever captured. Stay calm. Look for the exits. Leave no trace.  
   
But he has nothing. Nowhere to run to, even if he could get out without being detected. He’ll be locked up, no matter what. If Hydra catches up to him, finds out he’s solved their latest game and gets to him, they’ll put him back in the ice chamber that makes him sleep. If he’s found by anyone else, he’ll be put in a prison, or a madhouse. Those places, those fortresses outside cities they use to send people who’d lost their minds. They’d wrap them up in white and toss them into the back of a car and they would never, ever come back. He’s panicking, sweating and gasping for air. He runs outside, to the trees and the lake. He could swim. He could get to the other side, it’s not that far. But then what?  
   
“Bucky?”  
   
He turns, struggles to breath as the imposter stands in the doorway, sleep-mussed and confused. It’s a game. He’s better at it, than the others were. He kept it going for a lot longer.  
   
“What’s going on?”  
   
“You’re not Steve,” the soldier mutters to himself, reminding himself. Because he  _wants_ it to be Steve. Wants to rush over and jump into his arms and let Steve kiss him and hold him and take all the pain away. He wants it to be true so badly. They always knew that. It’s how they got him.  _You’re nothing_ , the voices hiss at him.  _Why would he ever want you?_  
   
A deeper frown, and parted lips. “What – Bucky, what? What’s happening?”  
   
“You’re not Steve!” he yells.  
   
The imposter takes a step, and the soldier backs up. He’s unarmed. He’s so  _stupid_ , he stopped wearing the knives and the guns are inside and he has nothing to defend himself with except his arm. It hums in response to the thought, plates clicking together. He could fight. He probably has better chances of getting away if he doesn’t. Before the imposter can say anything else, the soldier turns away from him, and runs.

\----


	5. Recovery

On instinct, Steve chases. He doesn’t think, he doesn’t consider strategy or consequence, he just takes off after Bucky. Bucky’s arm is stronger than Steve’s are, that had been proven in their recent combat, but Steve is faster. The serum Erskine gave him is better than the knock-off, copycat version Hydra must have injected into Bucky when they’d captured him in ’43 before Steve got there in time to stop it from happening. Steve catches up easily, and flails to grab for Bucky’s flesh arm. Bucky stops and turns, fight or flight response shifting violently back to fight. His long hair whips into his face, partially covering wild eyes. He shoves Steve backwards, and Steve falls, landing painfully on the hard ground.  
   
“Buck,” he gasps, struggling to get back to his feet and facing a Bucky who isn’t  _Bucky_ anymore. He looks once again like he’d looked on the helicarrier, when Steve had begged him to move, begged him to stand down, and the soldier had stared blankly at him as if Steve’s words didn’t register as dialect in his brain. As if Steve’s lips were moving but no sound was coming out, or at least not a sound the solider could hear.  
   
Bucky throws a punch that Steve manages to block with his forearm. A second punch gets him on the jaw, the metal fingers connecting with muscle and bone. Steve grunts and pain pulses over his skin.  
   
“It’s me,” Steve insists. “I don’t know what’s happening but it’s  _me_.”  
   
With heavy breathing and sharp, narrowed eyes, Bucky says, “I’ve heard that before.”  
   
Steve gapes at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. From who?”  
   
“From you!”  
   
“I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Steve shakes his head. “Did I do something? Did I – say something in my sleep?”  
   
“It always starts out this way!” Bucky shouts. He sounds hysterical, on the verge of running again, and willing to go through Steve if he has to. “You always start out nice! I’m not falling for it again.”  
   
Steve feels like Bucky is speaking another language. His head hurts, half from the punch and half from fear, and it aches in his chest to see Bucky’s manic eyes and his rigid stance, when just 12 hours ago he’d been warm and pliant and trusting in Steve’s lap. Every bit of progress they’ve made, and Steve is watching it crumble right before his eyes.  
   
Then, something clicks. Pieces fit together, other things Bucky has said over the last month, offhand comments he’s made that Steve didn’t find significant at the time but now slide into place in his mind. Steve covers his mouth, sick to his stomach and horrified. “They used me.”  
   
Bucky exhales at him, and his nostrils flare. It had been half a question, even though Steve hadn’t phrased it that way, and Bucky’s reaction confirms it.  
   
“They found someone who looked like me, and tortured you with him.”   
   
It’s the first time he’s used the word  _torture_  out loud, other than in his conversation with Tony. Steve hadn’t wanted to use it before Bucky did. He didn’t want to assign to Bucky how he should feel about it, how he should classify it, how he should remember it. But there aren’t adequate synonyms for what was done to him, and they’ve been dancing around this for too long.   
   
“What did he do?” Steve asks. His heart in his chest really feels like it might be breaking, splitting itself in two. “He was nice, at first, you said? Made you think I was there to rescue you?”  
   
“How do I know it’s not happening again?” Bucky asks, voice raspy and shoulders shaking.  
   
Steve rubs his hands over his face, and wants to scream. “I don’t know, I … did they ever let you out? Of wherever they kept you?”  
   
Bucky stares, and doesn’t answer, but Steve gets his answer anyway.  
   
“They didn’t, right? Not like this.” Steve gestures at the trees and open space surrounding them. “Look around. Look where we are. Out here in the open, no locks, no restraints. I’ve left you alone. I said you could leave, if you want. I didn’t touch you when you didn’t want to be touched. They never did that.”  
   
Bucky’s eyes close, and are bright with tears when he opens them again.  
   
“Buck, it’s really me, I promise,” Steve pleads. He steps in closer with his hands raised. Back to how he’d approached a month ago, slow and as nonthreatening as he can make himself. He’s so big, it’s difficult to be unassertive, but Bucky knows him. That’s still there, inside. It has to be. Steve clings to that hope, that Bucky still knows, somewhere deep inside, that Steve is gentle and would never hurt him.  
   
“I don’t …” Bucky exhales again, shudders with it.  
   
“The first time you told me you loved me, you thought I was asleep.”  
   
Bucky just keeps staring at him, terror still splayed all over his face, tears slipping down his cheeks.  
   
“You remember that?” Steve can tell he does. He’s desperate, and reaching for anything that might break the spell and bring his Bucky back in off this cliff. “It can’t be a trap, because you didn’t even know I knew that, so there’s no way Hydra could know it. Right? I was sick, just after we got our own apartment. After my mother died. You were so scared I was gonna die too, you never said it, but I could tell. You thought I was asleep, one night, and you were talking to me. Begging me not to leave you. You told me you loved me.”  
   
“Don’t,” Bucky whispers.  
   
“I know you remember. You told me you were in love with me, in a way you weren’t supposed to be. In a way that would land you in Hell if Father Kennedy was right about people like us. You were crying, I could hear you.” Steve swallows through a tightened throat, and blinks tears from his own eyes. “I should’ve opened my eyes and said it back. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t. I should’ve told you right then, that I’d been in love with you for my whole life, instead of letting you feel alone. It was another three months before you got brave enough to say it to me again.”  
   
Bringing his hands up to his head, Bucky shuts his eyes again and presses his palms into either side of his skull, squeezing.  
   
“We were drunk, that time, remember?”   
   
Bucky lets out a quiet, unhappy noise, and won’t open his eyes.  
   
The memory courses through Steve like liquid fire. How much he’d wanted, how much he’d  _longed_  to touch. The way Bucky smelled with sweat on his skin and liquor on his breath, how warm he’d been next to Steve, how his hands had to be clenched into tight fists to keep them to himself. 19 years old, no experience to speak of other than a few awkward kisses with reluctant girls Bucky had convinced to be one quarter of a double date. No hands but his own ever having touched underneath his clothes, except for the chilly nights in January when they’d cuddle to share body heat and Bucky would tuck his fingers under the waistband of Steve’s shorts to keep them warm. Steve always woke up hard and sweating and aching to nudge those fingers lower.  
   
Steve’s entire world had spun on Bucky’s axis. He’d been so terrified that Bucky had just been out of his mind with worry when he’d confessed feelings months earlier and hadn’t really meant it.  
   
“We had extra money for once and we were drunk, and we were sitting on the floor in front of our couch, and you kissed me. And then you freaked, thinkin’ I was gonna push you away and hate you and make you leave. But I didn’t. I’d been thinking about kissing you for years. God, for  _years_ , Buck. Years I’d been lookin’ at you when you were half naked in the summer, heat curling in my gut, all kinds of unholy things runnin’ through my head that I wanted to do to you. Places I wanted to taste you. All kinds of things I wanted to let you to do me, that would’ve made our mothers cry if they ever knew. I wanted to give you everything.”  
   
Bucky just shakes his head.  
   
“I’m so sorry for what they did to you,” Steve breathes, finally inching in close enough to touch. His hands find Bucky’s, gently coaxing them away from his head so he doesn’t hurt himself. The skin on his temples is bright white where the heels of his palms had been pressing in. “I’m sorry it  _wasn’t_ really me all those times, I’m sorry I didn’t find you decades ago before they could hurt you this bad.”  
   
“Steve.”  
   
“It’s me. I promise it’s me. I promise you’re safe now.”  
   
Bucky shatters all at once, knees giving out and collapsing. Steve catches him and sinks to the ground with him, holding him as tightly as he can, squeezing a handful of his hair so tight his knuckles go white. Bucky clings to him and breaks in his arms. Steve realizes, as he hugs Bucky’s shaking body to his chest, that it’s the first time he’s cried. They’ve been here a month, and Steve’s cried plenty, but Bucky hasn’t shed a single tear. He’s been guarded, and careful with his emotions. Now he sobs against Steve’s shoulder, and Steve cries too, keeping him close and crumbling with him right there on the lawn.

\----

 

“Can you tell me what happened?”  
   
His hand moves slowly on Bucky’s back, rubbing up and down his spine, gentle, rhythmic. Something to be focused on. Bucky is on top of him, his face tucked in and Steve’s arms around him. A heavy blanket completes the pile, draped over them both like an extra protective barrier. The shades are drawn. The lights are off. Bucky keeps his eyes closed anyway. He doesn’t want to see the world right now. It hasn’t been this bad since the day they ran. On that giant flying ship, when Steve had called him Bucky and called them friends and dropped his shield. When Bucky’s brain was breaking, cognisance painfully fragmenting, memories screeching at him, deafening.  
   
“I don’t know,” he admits, still tearful. Everything feels raw, close to the surface, and so brittle. “I woke up, and … I don’t know.”  
   
Steve exhales into his hair. His hand still moves, up and down, predictable. Comforting. “Can you … tell me what the lightening chair is?”  
   
A cold wave washes over him even though Steve’s body is warm underneath him. Bucky pushes his face further into Steve’s neck, inhales, lets the familiar smell of his skin be soothing. Flashes of that return as well. The mouthguard. So his teeth didn’t break as he screamed.  
   
“Okay,” Steve whispers. “It’s okay, you don’t have to.”  
   
“Tell me about you?” Bucky requests. He needs it, needs the distraction, and he’ll beg for it if he has to. And Steve has spent a month doing what he always does – putting himself last on a list that includes the entire world. Bucky can’t carry on like this. He can’t be something Steve gives up everything for. He isn’t worth the sacrifice. “Can’t have been easy, waking up in the future.”  
   
Steve is silent just for a moment before he comments, “only one other person’s ever asked me that. His name’s Sam. You’ll like him.”  
   
“Does he look out for you?”  
   
“Yeah.”  
   
“Keep you from doing stupid things?”  
   
Steve chuckles warmly. “He tries.”  
   
“Then I like him.”  
   
“It wasn’t easy,” Steve says, answering Bucky’s earlier question. “Everyone I knew was long gone. I missed you, so much it hurt to breathe. And the world’s changed so much. Cell phones and surveillance and …”  
   
“Netflix,” Bucky suggests.  
   
Steve smiles into his hair. “That’s one of the good things.”  
   
“What are the bad things?”  
   
“So many of the things we hoped would be better, the things I thought we were fighting for, are just the same. We thought we were helping people, freeing people. Fighting for a better world. But people are still suffering, because they look the wrong way or were born in the wrong place or love the wrong person. There’s still evil. We always talked about a future where people would be free, and … maybe it’s still coming. But it’s not here now.”  
   
“If I remember you like I think I do, you’re still fighting. And you’re not gonna stop until the world  _is_ better.”  
   
Steve’s hand still moves, up and down like a pendulum, over Bucky’s back. “You remember me right. Think of that. Isn’t that a miracle, all by itself?”  
   
Bucky kisses his neck. His voice breaks over a painful admission that he knows Steve deserves more than this. More than being stuck here, trying to put Bucky back together.  
   
“I’m not stuck.” Steve lays a kiss to the top of his head. “I’m right where I wanna be.”  
   
Bucky stays against him, and tries to believe it.

\----

   
Steve keeps Bucky as close as he can for the remainder of the day. Goes back to near-constant contact, like he did before when things were still delicate. He holds Bucky’s hand, or sits close enough to be pressed against him, or keeps his ankle against Bucky’s under the table. Keeping his presence physical, so Bucky has no choice but to remember Steve is here with him. That he isn’t alone in all this. He was never alone, with Hydra, but he was. He was surrounded, but not by people who cared for him, not by anyone who gave a shit whether he lived or died beyond his value as a commodity. As their  _weapon_. He wasn’t human, to them. Not since the moment they dragged him from that canyon in France. Maybe even before that. Steve has never known exactly what they did to Bucky when they had him the first time.  
   
As the sun goes down, they’re back in Bucky’s bedroom. Back on the bed, curled together, staring at his ever-expanding memory wall. Steve has drawn more chipmunks, and more smiles on Bucky’s face, both old and new. Bucky rolls on top of him, suddenly, taking Steve by surprise but kissing the shocked noise from his mouth. He devours Steve’s mouth, out of nowhere ravenous. Rocking into him and pushing his tongue inside and breathing hard.  
   
Steve’s body responds, even as his heart breaks. “Hey,” he whispers, squeezing the back of Bucky’s neck in his cupped hand, holding Bucky’s hip in the other to still him. “Slow down, it’s okay.”  
   
“You don’t …?” Dejected and confused and miserable, and Steve internally screams at himself.  
   
“No,” he says quickly, “no, of course I do. I promise I do.”  
   
The words are laughably inadequate. Steve aches with it, burns from his core with desire to get back what had been his so many years ago. He’s missed it, he’s longed for it, he’s felt lost without it. But he can’t let Bucky give it to him for the wrong reasons. He can’t let Bucky think it’s payment, for Steve helping him.  
   
“We just don’t have to.”  
   
Bucky shakes his head, lips parted, not understanding. “You said you wanted me.”  
   
“Buck,” Steve murmurs. It  _hurts_ , to hear Bucky sound so exposed, so afraid of being rejected. He kisses him, soft and slow. Tries to pour into it words that he can’t say. “I do. But y _ou_ don’t have to. I need you to know that.”  
   
“I thought you still …”  
   
“I  _do_ still,” Steve insists again. The air between them is muggy, and weighted. “Just like before. I never stopped wanting you for a second. I just don’t want you to think you owe me.”  
   
“I …” Bucky struggles, flounders, and Steve holds him. Guides Bucky’s head down, to rest against his chest. “I remember being with you felt like flying. Like being free. I just want that back.”  
   
“Did they hurt you … like this?” Steve is fairly certain he already knows the answer, but he needs Bucky to admit to it.  
   
“At the beginning,” Bucky confesses quietly, in the protective circle of Steve’s arms. “When they were trying to break me. When they were trying to take every piece of me and make it theirs.”  
   
It’s a nauseating thought. Steve tries to swallow it, tries not to let it manifest in anger, in an uncontrollable desire to jump up right now and track every remaining Hydra agent down and kill them excruciatingly slow, even if it takes the rest of his life.  
   
“But I’m not,” Bucky adds. He lifts his head up. There are tears shining unshed in his ocean eyes, but he looks determined. “I’m not theirs. I’m yours.”  
   
“You’re  _yours_ ,” Steve corrects, desperately needing Bucky to understand. “You’re right that you don’t belong to them. But you don’t belong to me either. You belong to yourself. They tried to steal that from you, and I can’t do the same thing. I’d never, ever forgive myself.”  
   
Bucky shakes his head. “You aren’t. Not if I give it, right? It’s my choice?”  
   
Steve nods.  
   
“I choose you, then.”  
   
Steve has to clench his jaw to keep from crying again. He tilts his chin up for a kiss, even softer than the last. Bucky melts into him.  
   
It’s brand new, and a hundred years old. He touches Bucky with reverence, with the care he’s always, always deserved. When Steve was 20, Bucky was his north star. His morning light through thin curtains and his evening dew on metal steps. His sin and his salvation. Steve loved him more than he thought should be possible, more than was smart, more than was safe. He could never help it. He fell in love the moment they met. He’d been five years old, and wouldn’t understand it for more than a decade, but it had instantly been the kind of love that changes tides and moves mountains. Now, chronologically, he’s 97. It hasn’t dulled, or faded, or changed in any of the ways that matter. Everything has changed around them, and Bucky is still his true north.  
   
Steve lets his legs fall apart, lets Bucky’s hips settle between them. It’s so familiar, having him pressed close. Steve was forced to live without it, and he accepted the loss, but he never forgot. So much history vibrates in the space between their bodies. In Brooklyn, Steve was so much smaller. He was long limbs and protruding bones and a reedy frame, and Bucky always scooped him up into their bed in a way that made Steve feel so loved without condescension. He always made Steve feel like his inadequacies didn’t matter. After Project Rebirth, Steve was suddenly tall and broad and muscled, but it hadn’t been different in any of the ways that matter. Other people had looked at him differently, but he’d still been the same on the inside. He’d still been insecure, he’d still felt insufficient, he’d still longed to be valued by his character instead of his stature. And Bucky was still the only person who did that.  
   
“Stevie,” Bucky murmurs, as he drags his lips along Steve’s cheek.  
   
It’s the first time he’s called Steve by that nickname since he’s been here. It’s also the first time Steve’s heard it in decades, because he’d never let anyone else call him that. He dissolves back into the mattress and takes Bucky with him. This body close to his, Steve knows so well. He may be years out of practice, but he could never forget the way Bucky was meant to fit against him. Steve has mostly stopped believing in the Catholic God he’d been raised with, but he can’t deny that some omniscient being must have designed him to fit like puzzle pieces with Bucky.  
   
“I missed you so much,” Steve whispers to him. He doesn’t voice the darker connotations of that line of thought: that he’d been missing Bucky while believing they would never, ever see each other again. He doesn’t speak out loud how hopeless he’d felt, how purposeless, how futile saving the world had seemed when he’d believed the world didn’t contain the one person for whom he would happily set it aflame.  
   
“I remembered you,” Bucky whispers back. He’s so fixated on that, so engrossed by the idea that no matter what Hydra did to him, he retained his memories of Steve.  
   
Steve could weep over it, a whole lot more than he’s let himself. Maybe one day he will. Maybe one day he’ll collapse onto the floor and let himself sob for hours over the beauty and the tragedy of it all. Today isn’t that day. Today is about reclaiming things that had been stolen from him so many years ago – from both of them.  
   
He rolls them over, so Bucky is underneath him. He’s so  _beautiful_ , it’s utterly catastrophic. Bright blue eyes blink up at Steve. Sweet lips and high cheekbones and dark hair splayed out like a halo on the pillow around his head. Even after all the violence he’s been subjected to, after everything that’s been done to him, Bucky is still angelically beautiful.  
   
“Hey,” Steve says softly.  
   
Bucky smiles, a honied curve of his lips and crinkles at the edges of his eyes. “Hi,” he answers, just as soft, with his flesh hand coming up to card fingers through Steve’s hair. Between their legs, Steve can feel him, stiff and hot and wanting. It’s an intoxicating rush. It’s something he hasn’t felt in decades, but he’s never forgotten it. He rolls his hips so they rub together, his own erection throbbing as it slides next to Bucky’s. Sparks fly down his spine.  
   
“You’re sure about this?” Steve asks, because he needs to check, even as his head spins in arousal. It’s been so long. He’s barely touched himself, these last few years, other than in a perfunctory, mechanical way that was more about maintenance than anything else. Natasha kept trying to set him up on dates but he couldn’t bring himself to imagine moving on. Not when he’d already met and lost the love of his life. Steve never in a million years thought he would get this back. He was prepared to spend the rest of his life missing it.  
   
“We used to. I remember that. I remember how good you felt.”  
   
“Doesn’t mean we have to, now.”  
   
A slow, deep kiss replaces a satisfactory auditory answer.  
   
Bucky’s hands still hold Steve like he’s small, even though he isn’t. His lips still paint patterns in silk on Steve’s skin, delivering him in from the cold, bringing him home. His breath still hitches when Steve touches him, his eyes still go bleary when he’s lost in it, his voice is still music in Steve’s ears. He tastes the same on Steve’s tongue, warm skin and salt mixed with mellow sweetness. He still makes the same quiet, gasping noises as Steve worships his scars, and kisses him breathless, and cradles him close.  
   
The world narrows down as Bucky slides down Steve’s body and takes him between his lips. He hasn’t forgotten how Steve likes it, every spot on him that’s sensitive, just the right way to move his tongue to make Steve cry out and squirm on the mattress. Bucky took it so seriously, when they’d started up this thing between them, to learn every inch of Steve, make lists in his head of just the right way to work him and never forgot it. He’d had to relearn it, during the war when Steve was suddenly in a different body, and he’d done that, too. All his programming, all those decades of control, and Bucky still knows. So many things Hydra tried to torture out of him, but they didn’t manage it.  
   
“Buck,” Steve gasps, tangling his fingers in Bucky’s long hair, so much more of it to tug on than there was in Brooklyn. He was so sweet, in Brooklyn. So kind and loyal, so fascinated by science and new technology, wide-eyed and curious and so easily awestruck, so fiercely protective. And he loved Steve so intensely. At the time, Steve maybe didn’t even realize the extent of it. Didn’t realize everything he had, until it was ripped away. Against all possible odds he has Bucky back, back in his arms, back where he belongs. Steve won’t make the same mistake twice. He’ll keep Bucky safe, this time. He has to.  
   
He pulls gently, coaxing Bucky back up, not wanting it to be over so soon and if Bucky keeps sucking him like that it will be. He finds Bucky’s lips again, opening his mouth against them so Bucky can explore with his tongue and push Steve’s own flavor back at him.  
  
  
“Still taste the same,” Bucky tells him. The thought sends heat and electricity along Steve’s veins.   
   
“You remember?”  
   
“I think I remember everything. I think I just can’t always access it the second I want to. But it’s all in there.”  
   
Steve trails his hand down Bucky’s back, cupping his ass and urging him to move so they can feel each other between their stomachs. Bucky used to love doing that. Used to love shoving Steve down onto their lumpy couch and lying on top of him and grinding against him until Steve was incoherent and babbling and begging Bucky to get inside him.  
   
“Stardust,” Steve murmurs to him, hands and hearts intertwined, his lips against the gentle curve of Bucky’s cheek. Leaving the words on him, an invisible brand, a protection sigil. A forever sort of promise.

\----

  
Steve gets a call, on some kind of magic table in one of the rooms that sends pictures up into the air above it. His friend, from before, with the hard expression and the thin facial hair in lines on his chin, and a woman Bucky almost recognizes. Like he’s seen her before, in a dream.  
   
“Hey, Cap,” she says.  
   
“Hi Nat,” Steve answers. “Sorry about all this.”  
   
She shrugs. “We’ll figure it out. How is he?”  
   
“Better. Making progress.”  
   
“Glad to hear it. Tell him I said that?”  
   
“Yeah, I will. Where’s Sam?”  
   
“In DC, for now. He’ll be here, when you get here.”  
   
“Is he pissed at me?”  
   
She shakes her head. “Nobody’s pissed at you, Steve. It’s a shitty situation, but we understand.”  
   
Steve’s voice sounds emotional as he thanks her, and the man named Tony sounds impatient as he steers the conversation back to other matters. Steve talks to them for a long time. Bucky waits, in the doorway, apprehensive and squeezing his hands in and out of fists for something to do with them. The word  _extradition_  comes up again, like it had when Steve’s friend was here, and Bucky still doesn’t know what it means. When Steve finally shuts the magic down, he licks his lips and takes a deep breath before looking at Bucky. His expression is difficult to read, but it isn’t sad. It might be hopeful.  
   
“They’re gonna come get us. Take us back to Tony’s … this building, where I lived for a while.” Seeing Bucky’s worried frown, Steve quickly continues, “it’s not a prison. It’s an apartment, actually. Like the one we had, only a lot bigger and fancier. My team, we each have our own apartment that takes up a whole floor. You’ll stay with me, in mine. Until we can get this sorted out. You’ll be safe, there.”  
   
“As safe as here?”  
   
“Much safer than here. We’re not protected, here, it’s just luck that no one’s found us other than Tony. His tower is armed with all kinds of technology, no one can get in unless we let them. It’s the safest place for you.”  
   
Bucky nods. He hates himself for it, but asks, “it … you’re not, leaving me, are you?”  
   
“No. Never.” Steve comes over, and pulls Bucky into a deep, expressive kiss. “I trust them. I trust them completely. But it’s up to you. If you wanna stay here, that’s what we’ll do.”  
   
Bucky suspects it isn’t really up to him. He suspects Steve is just saying that, banking on Bucky coming back with the right answer so it doesn’t seem like he’s forcing Bucky into it. He appreciates the gesture, even if it’s hollow. He nods and kisses back. He doesn’t trust them, because he doesn’t even know who they are, but he trusts Steve.

\----

  
He sits on the lawn, one last time, the morning they’re scheduled to leave. Bowl in hand, filled with seeds, waiting. As always, it’s only minutes before they emerge. They must live close by, and have a keen sense of smell, and recognize him when they venture out to follow their noses. Their little feet scurry over, happily munching seeds from his hand and the bowl and the ground at his feet. Bucky gently strokes the one in his hand with his thumb – his real thumb, this time, so he can feel the soft fur.  
   
Steve joins him after a while, slowly enough that the chipmunks only run a few feet away and come back quickly once Steve is settled behind Bucky, bracketing his body. He kisses Bucky’s cheek, and Bucky leans back into him, letting Steve’s chest take his weight.  
   
“Will they be okay, if we go?”  
   
“They were okay before we got here,” Steve reminds him. He rubs Bucky’s stomach through his t-shirt. “We’ll leave out a bunch of seed so they have a big feast the next few days. And we can come back, in a while, once things are settled.”  
   
“Are your friends gonna hate me? For taking you away from them?”  
   
“You didn’t take me anywhere,” Steve argues gently. “And no one’s gonna hate you. If they do I’ll beat them up.”  
   
Bucky manages a laugh. He holds out his metal hand. “I can take care of myself.”  
   
“I know you can.” Steve runs his nose up Bucky’s cheek and follows it with his lips. “But you don’t have to.”

\----

   
Fury sends a motorcade and an armored van to pick them up, for Bucky’s safety in case Hydra is watching. Steve rides in the van with him, holding his hand, so Bucky knows he isn’t a prisoner, just someone in need of extra protection. It’s a few hours drive back to Manhattan, and they’re mostly quiet because there are armed guards inside the van with them, but Steve tries to talk quietly, to tell Bucky about his apartment at the tower, to distract him. So he isn’t overheard, he leans in close to Bucky’s ear as he tells him the shower stall is big enough for both of them. That gets him a tentative smile. Steve is just a little nervous about being this affectionate in front of four agents he doesn’t know, but he figures the secret is out anyway.  
   
Tony greets them in the garage, with more guards, and takes them to his penthouse. Steve keeps Bucky close, feeling the agitation in his shoulders as he wraps an arm around them. Bucky hugs around his middle, keeping his face buried in Steve’s shoulder and letting Steve lead him to the elevator. He’s scared, and Steve is his anchor. The room is crowded when they get off, Nick Fury and Maria Hill standing to one side of the elevator, and Sam, Natasha, and Bruce on the other. Their expressions range from curious to empathetic to sharp and hardened – that one is Natasha, watching Bucky with well-trained eagle-eyes as Steve leads him off the elevator and into the open space of Tony’s high-ceilinged living room. He doesn’t blame her for being suspicious. Steve isn’t the only one who’s taken a bullet to the gut fired from a gun in the soldier’s hand. And she’s protective, of all of them. Of her family. She doesn’t say it much, but Steve’s always seen it.  
   
Tony goes to Fury, signing a few documents that Maria hands him on a clipboard and ironing out a few details.  
   
“He’s going to have to stay here, for the foreseeable future,” Fury tells him. “Getting him exonerated from so many kills in so many countries is going to be complicated. We can’t claim criminal insanity, or they’ll lock him up in a different kind of cell.”  
   
Bucky stiffens in Steve’s arms, and makes a small, hurt noise.  
   
“They’ll have to get through me, first,” Steve asserts.  
   
“Captain Drama Queen’s back,” Tony mutters, but out of the corner of Steve’s eye, he can see Sam smirking approvingly.  
   
“Sergeant Barnes,” Fury says kindly. Bucky does look at him. “I didn’t say it would be impossible. I said complicated. But we’ll work on it. For now, we need you to stay here, alright?”  
   
Bucky nods. Steve rubs his shoulder.  
   
Fury shares a weighted look with Tony, and then makes his exit with Maria nodding at Steve as she follows. She gives him a small, friendly smile.  
   
Bruce approaches once they’re gone, with his typical half-slouched posture and timid smile. “Sergeant Barnes? I’m Dr. Banner. If you wouldn’t mind coming with me to my lab, I’ll check you out, make sure you’re okay?”  
   
Bucky doesn’t answer, but Steve can feel the tension again. He keeps rubbing Bucky’s shoulder. “Not that kind of doctor,” he assures. “Not like them. He wants to help.”  
   
“Do I have to?” Bucky asks quietly.  
   
“No,” Steve stays immediately, cutting off Tony who was about to argue. He’s setting that up as a precedent right away: as long as no one else is in danger, Bucky doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do. “But, I’ll come with you, if you want.”  
   
Bucky doesn’t answer.  
   
Bruce frowns up at Steve, and he doesn’t know what to say, how to explain, without spilling all Bucky’s secrets to a room of strangers. And he isn’t willing to do that.  
   
Licking his lips, Bruce nods like he seems to understand anyway, and addresses Bucky again. “You know, I … I was exposed to radiation. It left me with this problem, sometimes I turn into this big, green, angry guy, and I go on smashing sprees all over town. Sometimes I hurt people, without meaning to. People who didn’t do anything wrong. And that – it sits with you, once it’s over, doesn’t it?”  
   
“I was a spy,” Natasha pipes up, from across the room. She comes a little closer, standing next to Sam. Steve makes eye contact with her over the top of Bucky’s head. “For the wrong people. For a long time. I’ve got a lot of kills under my belt, too, that I wish I could take back. But I can’t, and … this place, these people, gave me a second chance.”  
   
“Soldier,” Sam adds, gesturing to himself. “Like you. There’s always casualties in war. You avoid it when you can, and you regret forever the times you couldn’t.”  
   
Steve clenches his jaw to keep from embarrassing himself, and mouths  _thank you_ at them.  
   
Bucky consents to an examination. Steve does go with him, and holds his hand through it, but Bruce is gentle as always and makes Bucky laugh softly once or twice in spite his anxiety over it. It ends with no pain, no drugs, no moments where he’s too scared, and Steve puts it in the  _win_ column. He promised this would be okay, and it was, and every time he makes that promise and can keep it, Bucky trusts him just a little bit more.

\----

  
Steve was right, about the shower. It’s massive, it takes up an entire wall of the bathroom. Bucky doesn’t have the first clue as to why it would  _need_ to be as big as it is, but it’s lucky for them. Steve joins him in it, after Bucky’s been examined and assessed and released into Steve’s custody. Because Bucky wants him to. Steve hesitates, even though it had been his suggestion earlier in the prison van, because Bucky had told him about never being allowed privacy and Steve wants to give him that. But Bucky wants him close, so Steve stands with him under the warm spray, wrapped in silky soap suds that smell like warm earth and sweet flowers. He curls his fingers around Bucky and strokes, the slip eased by the water, and Bucky gets closer to feeling whole again every time Steve touches him. Every time Steve kisses him and makes him come, absorbing his moans and letting Bucky reciprocate, trusting Bucky with vulnerable parts of his body. He’s hurt so many people, but Steve isn’t afraid of him. He treats Bucky like he’s something precious, something worthy of reverence. Like he isn’t a weapon. Bucky is saved by it.  
   
He guides Steve’s hand around to his backside, after he comes and Steve swallows it down, exhaling happily when Steve’s fingers press between the cheeks and the tip of one brushes over Bucky’s most intimate place. “Later,” Steve tells him.  
   
“Yeah?” Bucky asks. He’d wanted it, back at the cabin, but he wanted everything else, too, and they barely had time to reacquaint themselves with each other before Steve’s people were coming to collect them. If the man with the eye-patch is telling the truth, Bucky will be in this new place for a long while yet. As long as Steve is here with him, Bucky’s happy about that. It means they have time.  
   
“Yeah,” Steve repeats. “I want that, too. Want you.”  
   
“Take …” Bucky hesitates. He tucks his nose under Steve’s chin, water dripping onto his face off Steve’s beard. “Take the bad things they did to me and make them okay again.”  
   
It isn’t fair, to ask that of Steve. Bucky knows it isn’t. He’s selfish, and he asks it anyway.  
   
“I will,” Steve whispers. He holds Bucky so close, rocking him gently under the warm cascade of water. “I promise I will.”  
   
The rest of his apartment is a paradox; the underlying architecture, the stuff Steve maybe didn’t choose for himself like the furniture and the floors and the paint on the walls, is mostly white, and minimal, and futuristic. But there are touches of Steve everywhere. Books crammed into a shelf, sketch-pads littered all over the place, small pops of color in cushions and hand towels and a shaggy rug in the living room. Everything they owned in Brooklyn was brown or dull green or grey. Bucky likes the idea of Steve in the future being drawn to bright colors. The windows along one wall are enormous, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. They’re up high, and the view of a sea of buildings is dizzying. Bucky can’t believe this is Manhattan; he can’t believe it looks like this now. Steve says the windows are re-enforced and treated with some sort of stain that makes it so they can see out, but people can’t see in. Bucky likes that. He predicts spending a lot of time in front of those windows, shielded from the world, watching it go by below him.  
   
The woman with red hair and the man who’d called himself a soldier are in Steve’s kitchen, when they emerge from the shower with damp hair and bare feet. They both look up, both with big smiles. Bucky is nervous for just a moment, but calms a little when Steve goes to them happily. Steve pulls them both into a hug at the same time, one in each of his big arms.  
   
“We missed you, idiot,” the woman says, fondly ruffling his hair.  
   
“I didn’t,” the man says, but the immediately calls himself on his own lie. “Fine, I did, please don’t ever die again.”  
   
“I’ll do my best,” Steve says with a laugh.  
   
“I like the beard,” the man says. His dark eyes twinkle. “Looks good on you, big guy.”  
   
“Thanks.” Steve laughs again. It’s like heavenly music.  
   
Unlike when his sarcastic friend had visited at the cabin, Bucky doesn’t feel his defenses rising as Steve hugs these two. He seems to like them, maybe even love them, so Bucky isn’t threatened.  
   
Steve turns, and holds out his hand, indicating Bucky should come closer. He does, a little cautiously, but only a little.  
   
“You guys have met, but not properly. This is James Barnes, my best friend from … well. The past, I guess.”  
   
The woman holds her hand out for Bucky to shake. “Natasha. We’re happy you’re here. Even though the last time we saw you, we were all shooting at each other.”  
   
“Nat,” Steve complains.  
   
“What? Doesn’t he know?”  
   
“He knows. Be nice.”  
   
“I’m always nice,” she informs him primly.  
   
The man shakes Bucky’s hand as well. “Sam.”  
   
“Bucky,” he responds, hoping they won’t call him James. Steve never does.  
   
Steve grins at him, and his arm goes back around Bucky, affectionate and protective. Bucky leans against him, because it’s automatic, now. He isn’t as used to doing it with an audience, but finds he doesn’t mind.

\----

   
His second day at the tower isn’t a great one. Bucky wakes up confused, forgetting for a few scary moments where he is and what’s happened and why he isn’t alone and who the body next to him in the bed belongs to. But then Steve rolls over, and his shining blue eyes bring Bucky back to the present, dragging him out of the nightmares that had threatened to continue into waking hours. Bucky sniffs and tries to cover his upset, but he was never any good at lying to Steve. Seeing through it immediately, Steve pulls Bucky into his arms and talks to him softly. Makes Bucky promise that he won’t hide. That he’ll let Steve help, when there are difficult moments, as there are bound to be in the future.  
   
“What if you can’t help?” Bucky asks, for Steve as much as for himself. Steve isn’t so good at accepting his own limitations. He never has been.  
   
“Just let me be here with you?” Steve kisses Bucky’s lips and hugs him tighter. “This is all gonna take time. Like at the cabin, right? No easy fixes. But we keep going, and it does get better. But not if you hide from me.”  
   
Bucky nods, and cuddles in closer. They’re naked, because they’d fallen asleep that way after Steve had fucked him so gently Bucky almost wept, and Steve’s bare skin is warm against his own. Bucky isn’t helpless. He  _could_ do this on his own, now. He likes, instead, the fact that he isn’t alone.

\----

   
On his third day at the tower, Steve brings Bucky a plastic bag filled with dark black soil, a small paper packet of ivy seeds, and the bowl from the cabin. Bucky didn’t know he brought it with them. He’d emptied it out and left it on the fireplace mantle where it had been before Steve filled it with seeds for the chipmunks. Steve had taken it down, and given it to one of the guards with strict instructions to be careful with it, along with the toy shield, the Bucky Bear, and all the Post-its and drawings. The rest are in Steve’s bedroom, now. He’d put everything back up on the wall. The sketch of Bucky with a chipmunk on his head Steve had put in a spot where Bucky can see it from his side of the bed. To remind him that he’s good, and that the small animals trusted him. He’d kept the bowl a secret until he could send out for a few things.  
   
“What’s this for?”  
   
“Tony’s not going to want it back, so its yours.” He sets the bowl on the counter, and hands Bucky the soil and the seed packet. “Thought it might be nice if something grew out of it. Even though it’s been broken.”  
   
Bucky knows what he’s doing, picks up immediately on Steve’s clumsy attempt at metaphor, but he holds back the eye-roll Steve can tell is there under the surface. He picks the glued-together bowl up, and Steve helps him line it with plastic wrap and fill it with dirt and gently pack the seeds into it. Bucky puts it on the windowsill in the bedroom –  _their_ bedroom. Steve hugs him from behind, wrapping his arms snugly around Bucky’s middle, and kisses his lips.  
   
Bucky smiles into it. Planets might align as he does. Steve swears he can feel it.

\----

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!  
>   
> [Follow artist TrishArgh on tumblr](https://frau-argh.tumblr.com/) or [on Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/trish_argh)  
> [Follow writer paperstorm on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/) or [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/turningthedials)  
> 


End file.
